Bicycle Lighting Systems from 70s & 80s

[InHisName]

Anyone old enough to remember the Bicycle Lighting Systems from Wash DC ?

They formed to provide lights to bike commuters who wanted more than the 3W dynamo could provide. They used NiCDs with sealed beam lights. Most had an 'interesting' beam pattern. Shine on a wall and see a trapazoid! MUCH brighter on top edge than the bottom edge. GE's official description for the 35W bulb was to light up two rows of corn for I forgot how far distance. Maybe 10 to 45 feet or more. The lane or path worked great and 10' away was only a little brighter than the 45' away part.

Are there any lighting designs being sold with beam shaping similar to this today ? Most LED lights seem to have NO shaping or very rudimentary polar shaping. Am I missing a whole group of designs somewhere?

 

[Matt King]

See the "Let's design a road front beam" thread, and the German StVZO specs. Such lights do exist, if not yet with the latest LED technology (which is very hard given emitters are getting bigger, not more intense)

 

[BrianMc]

A few of the dynamo lights are designed to also run from a battery (this thread ). There is also the Big Bang HID if you have a grand to spend.

Phillips introduced an affordable battery bike light meeting the German beam standards to Europe last fall that is under review at this Website. The link comes from the authors post (#10) in this thread in this forum which is exploring use of these dyanmo headlights with batteries.

At present, the Phillips light appears to be unavailable from a NA distributor, but a supplier is listed in that thread, if you are interested. It apparently uses two Phillips Luxeons (older LED technologhy) to very good effect.

The let's design a road beam thread has several DIY designs trying to get the more recent, larger, and higher output LED's into a road friendly beam. One uses a separate array of shaded low beam LEDs but this is not the trapezoid beam you talk of. Two, including one by panicmechanic a dynamo or battery light), and my high beam unit project trapezoids on the ground. As Matt King said above, the newer higher output LED's are larger in size, not more intense per unit area of the emitter. This causes problems for mirror and lens systems to get a narrow focussed beam as the light is not from the same small sized focal point. So you can't simply swap LED's and improve a Schmidt Edelux for example, or use old reflectors and lenses with the new LEDs to good effect. Some are trying to make or modify mirrrors to do this. The manufacturers will release new lights with these LEDs in a few years We wanted more light and just could not wait.

Hope this helps as a summary of the VERY long, sometimes deep, Design a road front beam thread.

Brian