Bicycle EverLED Light??

I've been lurking here for a few months and must say you guys are amazing. A great combination of knowledge, humor and controled lunacy - I feel right at home.

Please help me with a bicycle lighting problem. I'll be doing a ride in France this august which goes for 84 hours straight with very many hills. This includes at least 24 hours of night riding. The goal is to find light weight, dependable, water-proof lighting that doesn't have a large appetite for batteries. Carrying dozens of batteries to get through the night adds too much weight when climbing over hills all night.

Your forum has been a priceless source of information and my wallet is starting to suffer for this knowledge. I recently bought 2 EverLEDs thinking that they would fit into existing 4-AA bike lights. Two such bike lights loaded with lithium batteries would give me redundancy and extra light when going fast downhill.

I'm having trouble finding 4-AA bike lights that work well with the EverLED - anyone have suggestions??

Also, I'm looking for batteries with long runtime and low weight. Is there anything with a better power/weight ratio than the AA Lithium?

Anyone have run times for the EverLEDs?

As I wrote in one of the other EverLED tracks, I find the Zefal hf635 to take an EverLED with a modification to change the negative bulb connection from an outer-base to an edge contact. I also modified an old Cateye 2-C light, and this gave a better beam pattern, but I don't want to use Cs regularly. Tests so far have given over six hours of light staarting with OLD AA alkalines that were only giving "dark brown light" with the original incandescent bulb. I expect to get about ten hours from new alkalines, and to use two lights alternately. Good luck. See you in Paris!

Thanks Blubik - saw your earlier post in a different thread and almost bought the Zefal. Changing the batteries seemed very difficult and stopped me from buying. I'm currently looking at the Specialized 03 Astro. - it's supposed to be water-proof.

10 hours on alkalines sounds great. I'll try to do a run time test with lithiums.

I think you might want to post a note over in the Electrolumens forum. He has done some work with Luxeon bike lights in the past. I don't think you'll want the dual 5watt that he's working on currently as that will probably have less battery life /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

I saw some pictures of a light he made earlier that was the head from one of his excellent flashlights with a mounting bracket and a cable to a separate battery pack that you could strap anywhere on the bike. He could also do something custom for you with whatever battery config you wanted I'll bet.

Good luck on the PBP! Ought to be quite an adventure!

I don't have any suggestions to offer, but you might also want to consult folks at the Bikecurrent e-mail list. It's at www.topica.com/lists/bikecurrent , I believe. There's a few guys there that have spent some time tweaking lighting systems to use a minimal amount of batteries for these sort of events.

There's also the Randon list on Topica, but I assume you're familiar with that.

bon chance,
Steve Kurt

James - good advice. I'll head over there right now

Steve - you going to Paris? I went over to bikecurrent and there were some interesting posts -- many of them referred back to here.

thanks for asking, but I don't have any plans to do PBP. I'm kinda fond of sleeping, so that is a conflict of interests. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/sleepy.gif

This area (Peoria and the Quad Cities) does seem to have more than its share of randonneurs, tho. The best I've done so far has been a couple of double centuries. Most of my riding is for commuting and recreational. My lighting systems are a Schmidt dynamo w/Lumotec, and a heavily modified Niterider nicad system. I do have a 5W white Luxeon that I hope to use with the Schmidt dynamo. I've also cobbled together an assortment of standlights and led taillights in the past.

The bikecurrent list does share a few members with this happy group, which is nice since the bikecurrent list slows down in the summer.

Steve K.