Bike Lights for Winter

Yesterday when I rode to work I had dry roads for the first time in ages. No rain, no fog no heavy dew. I realised how much better my ability to see the road surface, potholes, gravel and other obstacles was. When the road's dry, there's much better contrast in my bike lights than when wet. Great. Today it's raining again the the roads wet and it almost certainly will be for lots of days to come.

I've long had the opinion that the bright white light from LED lights like my beloved AYUPs doesn't give quite the contrast that I get from a good halogen. So I thought I'd pull out an old trusty halogen light and do a bit of a comparison. I had to jerry up a battery pack and gaffer tape it to the bike but it worked. Alas, my last working dynapower dynamo carked it lots of years ago. The first thing I realised is that it just doesn't give out the light of the AYUPs or one of those modern Schmidt halogens. It did however shine a qualitatively different light on the wet road. I perceived that it was just a tad better at picking change of grade and subtle differences in the road surface. I was almost ready to resign myself to having to take out yet another home loan to buy a new front wheel with dynahub and a light when I had a brain wave. I took the AYUPs off the handlebars and held them down lower at brake-bolt height like the halogen.

Tahdah! It made a quite significant difference to how well I could see the road.

Now I've got a job for the weekend. I'm going to build a solid, light-weight brake-bolt mount for the AYUPs. I told Kerrie I was keeping those old bent handlebars for a reason. A second solution might be to drop a Minoura "thingo" from the handlebars and mount the lights upside down.

Here's a really good reason why I want the best lighting possible on my trip to work. The rock in the following picture was right in the middle of my riding path in a spot I normally pass at about 45kph in the dark. Fortunately this particular day I was driving and stopped to clear it away. Objects like this, whole truck tyre carcasses, dead roos and wombats are frequent obstacles on my way to work.

Just a couple of weeks ago I hit a slightly smaller rock along the same stretch, ripped the side out of an almost new tyre, bent a rim and nearly came off. Here's what the tyre looked like with two patches over the inside of the hole so I could get home. Fortunately I was able to fix the rim with a little bit of gentle panel beating.

Next time you see the police booking someone for not having their load properly covered, go thank them.

Only 3 more big sleeps 'till the days start getting longer