Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Dynamo (generator) lighting primer


I like modern generator lights better than the stick-on blinky lights most people use, especially for riding in the city and especially for riding with kids. They are a lot brighter than they used to be and let you be seen in traffic even during the day. They always are there, ready to go, and you don't have to change the batteries or charge them or think about them. Some you don't even have to turn on. The new LED ones have a "standlight" that keeps them bright for a few minutes after stopping, like at a stoplight. In general, a generator light is a great idea and really worth it for any bike you plan to ride for a long time in traffic, like your regular commuting bike. By the way, there's a technical difference between a generator and a dynamo but it doesn't matter to this application much, and the definition varies by the country you're in.

Let's say you live in Chicago and want to put these things on your bike.




The Generator or Dynamo (Power Supply)
The cheap pretty good way to do this is get a standard bottle dynamo from the olden days at Working Bikes or old stock somewhere. Union, Soubitez, Sanyo are all good, but anything will work. They are all 
6 volt 3 watt units (with very few exceptions: one rare 12 volt version exists). Make sure the brackets will fit together and fit on your bike and that the old wheel spins OK. In general it's recommended that you put on a bottle generator with the tire moving away from the mounting part, toward the spinny thing part, so the generator can't get caught in your spokes or something and become an emergency brake instead. Many old bikes don't do this though. You can put these things on the front wheel or the rear, and they come in both right and left versions if you have a specific mounting location in mind. The axis of the spinner has to be exactly in line with the radius of the wheel to keep noise down. Use a string from the middle of the spinner to the axle to verify the angle. The spinner itself should be right on the dynamo track molded into most tire sidewalls. If the dynamo is designed for the rim, which is unusual but much quieter, make sure it isn't rubbing the tire at all. A thin rubber spinner is needed for rim mounting.
A dynamo hub is always there and you don't even notice it.
If you want to go fancy instead get a new Busch & Müller or Axa/Basta bottle generator - efficient, black plastic, less noisy - for about $50, or use an old quiet Sanyo under-the-bottom-bracket generator if your tires are smooth. For very fancy, next time you need a new front wheel get a dynamo hub for it. They start at about $45 for Sanyo, $65 for Sturmey-Archer or Shimano and go up toward astronomical (ca. $300) for hand-carved aluminum hub jewelry from Germany, they don't make noise and they don't cause noticeable drag, even the crummy ones, whatever you might read online. There are various qualities of prebuilt dynamo wheels to fit most bikes, available on order from most bike shop wholesalers.

If you look around and you're lucky you might find an old 1960s Sturmey-Archer Dynohub. They last forever if you don't take them apart (! there is a special tool and way to do it or the magnets lose their oomph) and they work fine with modern LED lights. They produce slightly less power (1.7 to 2 volts) than modern generators so if you use old fashioned incandescent bulbs you need special low-voltage ones. Dynohubs can unscrew themselves if you put them on backwards - wide part on right is correct, for most models. Some have integrated brakes or even hub gears in them.



There is a recent product that calls itself a contact-free dynamo where you put little magnets on your spokes and the light generates power from them; neat, but inefficient (and that's how the others work, too, only with many more magnet points). These lights are dim, in my experience, but better than nothing since you don't have to think about turning them on.

The Lamp Options

Then, once you have a generator, you can get old used lights with bulbs in them. Total cost for the system with an old generator: $15 or less. But you'll be happier with LED lights. And it's getting very hard to find replacement bulbs in Chicago, though you can look online. Boulevard Bikes, JC Lind and a guy in New Hampshire named Peter White are the go-to people I know about for LEDs, though many shops in town can order these things. Read the Peter White Cycles website if you want details, then buy it locally. He is the distributor, so he'll still get his cut even if you don't order from him. Or go talk to the people at any local place that has some in stock.

The cheapest Busch & Müller LED front light with a standlight and reflector that I've bought new recently was $28 on special, but the really bright ones go up to over $100. The $28 one (a Lumotec Oval Plus) is still quite bright, and it blows the doors off one of those blinky things. You can ride down a dark forest path with it. It has a reflector integrated into it too. The bright ones like the Cyo N Plus are even better for that kind of thing but may be overkill in the city. I like the Cyo without a built in reflector myself, though both are good. In fact, no model I know of is particularly bad. The Lyt is a recent one that seems OK - we have one on one of our kids' bikes. Get a standlight if you can, especially in the city where you will be easier to see at an intersection. We also have had good luck with Basta front LED lights, but they didn't have a standlight so we swapped them out. I think the quality has been better on the B&M. Surely, there are excellent Japanese lamps available — many dynamos are from Japan — but I haven't seen them in the US yet. Comment if you find a source.

The back light with a standlight (!) will also be about $20 to $40. I like the Busch & Müller Top Line Plus, or Seculite Plus for fenders, but any of them are OK. There's one that has a brake light function if you slow down suddenly - neat idea, almost works. Get one that mounts well on your bike - fender, rack, or cantilever brake nubbin with an adaptor. Other brands of these things include Spanninga, Basta, and I'm sure plenty of others. The back light connects to the generator just like the front one does (especially if the generator is on the back wheel), or it can connect to the front light itself if you want to turn the whole system on and off with a switch on the headlight. I just leave mine burning all the time and it doesn't ever need me to think about it.

Installation Tips
Deciding where to mount the lights is a big decision. Generally I attach the front light to the brake mounting bolt in the front fork, though there are lots of options. This is good unless you need the space for a big basket or rack. If you turn the bracket over 180 degrees you can bolt it onto a fender, too. I don't often mount the headlight on the handlebars but some people do, and the suppliers above carry adapters to make it simple. The taillight works best on the fender, I think, but my bikes have steel or SKS fenders that are sturdy. The rear rack is also a good place; you can use a strip of vinyl coated stainless steel with bolt holes at each end to attach it. They sell these in bike stores to mount racks. There are also good adapters at the light supply stores. If you don't have fenders or a rack, and you aren't planning any (why not?) you can often mount these lights on the seat post or on a reflector type hanger coming from the rear brake bolt or frame cross between the seat stays. 



If you are going to drill a hole in a fender to mount it, remember that the drill bit will go right through your tire, too, and either remove the wheel or put a drill-proof board under your drilling site. Otherwise you'll be patching the tube, too. Not that I ever made that mistake, of course. Make sure you are drilling low enough and straight enough to have your lamp even and vertical when you are done.

I prefer to hook them all together with double stranded cable (two wires) which is more reliable than the old single wire. One of the wires, sometimes marked with a lightning bolt symbol, goes to the bottom of the bottle generator (or the lightning bolt side of the hub connector). The other wire, often with a ground/earth symbol that looks like a T with 3 top lines or with a white stripe, connects to any screw or other part of the bottle generator mounting bracket. I usually put a couple of centimeters of bare wire around the bolt at the mounting bracket's elbow, between the two arms of the bracket. At the lamp end, if there is no terminal for the ground wire, it connects to the metal arm or screw that holds the lamp onto the bike. If you connect everything and it doesn't work, reverse the wire connections first - LEDs, unlike light bulbs, can be particular about which wire connects to which side. (with AC power sources like generators it shouldn't matter but sometimes the system converts to DC and then it does.) The lights can flicker a little at low speeds, more with hub than tire generators.



There are lots of ways to route the wireI sometimes run the electrical wire along an existing brake or gear cable, sometimes run it in a plastic pipe which looks less fiddly than the thin wire, sometimes I zip tie it to the frame. Be careful not to make it hard to take the bike apart if something like a tire needs repair. Leave enough slack in front that the wheel can turn fully or you'll rip out your new lighting system all the time. 
I prefer stainless steel zip ties that look better on your bike and last longer than the black plastic ones. Harder to get off but you can crush the connector with a pliers. I got mine at a giant orange home supply store. I prefer the look of zip ties to the old method of winding the wire around and around the frame.

Cost
Total cost: $15 (for old style) to $75-90 (new lights, old bottle dynamo) to $150-200 (new hub and lights) to $$ for a SON hub with Schmidt EdeLUX lighting. There's a guy in Boston at a place called City Bikes who builds his own US made metal and glass retro styled LED standlight system - toward the high end of the scale.

There are a few how to articles and videos 
I've seen about making your own standlight headlight. It's a good way to save money since the electronics cost much less than the finished lights, but I think it's a little too involved to get into here and I just buy the finished lights myself. But there is a do-it-yourself option if you want. 
The bluish colored dynamo light (Cyo N Plus) on our bike, left,
is pretty visible even compared to car headlights
It's a pain and it costs some money to plan a generator lighting system out, and it takes an hour and some zip ties to connect it, but then you never have to think about it again, and it always works well. We use them on all our regular bikes, including the kids' bikes.




PS
We just added a post about lighting children's bikes.



last edit 3/27/12

Postcard from New York City

A two-way separated bike lane with parking spaces between
bikes and moving car traffic in Williamsburg, Brooklyn

So, we hear a lot in Chicago about how the Mayor is very interested in making His city a nice place to ride (or at least park) a bike, adding bike parking to the Millennium Park project and putting steel loops to park bikes on around the city. There's a nice lakefront path and a few little rides He and His minions permit, like the annual Bike the Drive fundraiser for the Active Transportation Alliance on Lakeshore Drive. 

He has a lot to learn still. So do the bike advocates in the Windy City. Maybe the new mayor can do more for bikes. And, how can we learn from the success of bike advocates in NYC? (See Streetsblog, for example. They seem more confrontational but also more transparent than here.) Better bike infrastructure could finally make Chicago my kind of town. It's separated bike lanes, and bike lanes in general, that make riding in the city with kids and their stuff an appealing transportation option for many people, including us.

We were just in New York City and we thought we'd have a look at the separated bike lanes we saw on a video linked from the Chainlink to see what they were like. The people we asked in NYC weren't at all negative, like the ones in the video. They were all really enthusiastic. The lanes were pretty clear of obstructions and well separated from traffic, with bike traffic lights and places for left-turning cars to alternate with bikes. Lots of pedestrians cross the lanes for a few blocks, but that's in Times Square where people look like ants crawling everywhere anyway. The rest is mostly clear sailing. We would love to ride on lanes like this every day. Unfortunately, we didn't get any good pictures of the lanes in midtown.  Above is an image of a separated double lane in Brooklyn with a different design. It looks like nirvana, seen from Chicago.

But the separated lanes, apparently popular and wonderful as they are, aren't the only lanes in NYC. In fact, they have a huge number of different kinds of lanes throughout the entire city. Here's a map site.
A typical side street bike lane - on the left of the one way car traffic
This is a bike lane like most in NYC, on the left of the car traffic lane. In theory, you don't get "doored" by a thoughtless driver as often then, since there are more drivers than riders in cars. Most of these lanes are kept pretty free, though the trash trucks creep down them and sometimes spill. Not all bicyclists go with the direction of traffic, either, and some don't stay in the lanes. In the night shot below, that's trash in the bike lane and a city bus blocking it as a delivery guy meanders the wrong way down the car lane in Tribeca.  Most of the delivery guys ride with no lights on electric powered E-bikes. They ride on sidewalks, too, with bags hanging off their handlebars. Don't be like them.

But in the 10 minutes I was on this block, most of the time it was wide open and being used about every 20-30 seconds by someone riding the right way on the path, swerving out to avoid the trash.


Is that a delivery E-bike with no lights coming the wrong way toward me?
The lanes are still really good, with markings across cross streets like crosswalks, even if the occasional cement mixer gets into the wrong place.


By getting most cyclists to congregate on the streets that have lanes, motorists see people using the lanes and learn to take cyclists into account more. Cyclists see each other, too. Messengers and grumpy fixie riders can choose the streets with no lanes and go as fast as they dare without any nasty other bicyclists getting in their way.
Bike box. No right turn on red in NYC.
And most lanes, like this one in Brooklyn, have an area in front of the car stop line for bicyclists to move across the street or prepare for a turn or just collect in front of other traffic to increase their visibility. Logically, they call it a 'bike box' (not a box bike, though you could have a box bike bike box, I guess). There isn't even ONE of these in Chicago. How about just a couple on Milwaukee Ave?

These innovations all add up to a city that works better for bikes than the City That Works. Anybody can get on a bike and feel comfortable using it to get where they need to go. The infrastructure invites all those New Yorkers who don't even have a drivers license to get up out of their train tubes and into the light, breathe the air, and smile at the people sitting in immobile taxis, as they pedal effortlessly through their newly accessible city. OK, lugging their two heavy locks with them, but still.

Grrr.