4314grt@houxf.UUCP (08/07/83)
Let There Be Light Two people asked about the bike light, so here is more info. Ed Kearney has (had?) a mail-order bike light business he was trying to sell. The last address I have for him is Bicycle Lighting Systems P. O. Box 1457 Falls Church, VA 22041 One lamp I use is a 4-in sealed beam unit made by GE for farm tractor use. Ed Kearney used to sell them (still??). The pattern is a trapezoid, which is ideal, as it projects into a rectangle on the road. It cost $12; the part number is 4411. The battery weighs over 5 lbs, has six 5-AH Gates Pb-acid cells. I carry it into my office, partly so the voltage does not drop in the winter. The light is in a housing Ed Kearney sold and is bolted onto the handlebar stem. Auto parts stores also sell housings for 4-inch sealed beam lamps. The lamp + my 3-watt taillight run the battery down in about an hour; the cells are only good for 60% of rated capacity when loaded to 3 amps. This is at 12 volts, by the way. Other lamps he sells are quartz-iodine (halogen) units made for emergency lantern use, including 10- and 12-watt sizes. They have rectangular beams, less effective, but a higher color temperature and hence higher efficiency. I use the 12-w unit on another bike; they are 6 volt units, so I have a 4-pin connector on the battery in order to get either 6 or 12 volts, according to the needed voltage. I would like to see GE or someone make a 20-watt quartz-iodine lamp with a rectangular beam (6 or 12 v). That would be as bright as the 35-watt conventional evacuated lamp and kinder to the battery. I kludged a wire bottle cage to hold the battery, but a company called Master Line sells a cage that will hold the standard 2 x 3 arrangement of Gates cells in a plastic case. That company sells a smaller sealed beam unit, but I do not like the beam patterns I have seen; I do not have their address. Bad guys with tools could swipe the light fixture, but I know of no problems here at Holmdel. Of course, one could have problems leaving the bike at some other place during off-hours. E.g. forget it in NYC. George Tomasevich houxf!sps!grt (usually), or hocda!54394gt , or houxf!4314grt (we are really 54311)