Some Follow Up--Beams!

The weather gods have been kind to me. Not only have I been able to enjoy relatively mud free rides, but I have been able to take beam shots. Normally, this time of year, I am either waiting out rain or fog. Earlier this week, I had neither. Therefore, I grabbed the camera and set off for my favorite spot to shine the lights.

Man, I have a lot of pictures of this one spot of the county park. Which is closed at night. I keep waiting for the local constabulary to tap me on the shoulder and ask what I'm doing at night in a closed park, but so far, no-one has.

Let's run through the Ay-Up lights first, then we'll hit the upgraded Lupine's and see how they fair against NiteRider's best.

Here is the spot beam:

As usual, click on the image for the bigger version.

Intermediate beam:

And, the first time for us, wide:

As you can see, as the beam spreads out, it loses its throw. That's just the breaks of having a finite amount of light to work with. So far, I like the wide beam off the bike best, with the intermediate and spot beams handling bike duty.

Now, on to the Lupines. These are the lights that I upgraded in my last post. Let's start off with the Wilma (now with a claimed output of 1100 lumens). To compare to the older set up, see HERE.

As you can see, it is still a bit of a spot... but brighter. The Betty was also bumped up in specs:

My initial thoughts are that I can't help but think that Lupine could have taken all of that light and spread it out more. It now has a (claimed) 1750 lumen output. I kept expecting the tree in front to catch fire. It is crazy bright, but all that light is placed dead center. To be fair, when paired with the Wilma, it makes a fantastic set up that allows you to ride as fast as you want. But I was hoping for something more like NiteRiders Pro1200 (below). You know, good projection and some beam spread. There are 7 LEDs to work with after all.

What do you think?

Upgrades

As I mentioned last time, we received the upgrade kits to Lupine's Betty and Wilma. I've now had a chance to perform the operation, and both patients were a success. The last time we did an upgrade it was to an older Wilma, so I thought that this time I'd document the Betty.

First make sure that the light is disconnected from the battery!!

Thanks.

Now, remove the front lens by unscrewing the bezel--righty tighty, lefty loosey.

Next, remove the screws using the included hex key and remove the lens/collimator.

I tapped the light head on my palm--face down--to dislodge the circuit board that contains the emitters.

The new one is on the left and the old one on the right. I found the differences in emitter size to be amazing. Not only are the new emitters brighter, they are much smaller. This is why the old lens doesn't work. The new one is made for the smaller LEDs.

Reverse the process to put the light head back together, lining up the collimator over the new LED board and screwing in the screws.

After the light head is back together, plug in the battery and make sure that everything works as it should--that is, that the light actually turns on.

That's it. It took longer to type this up than it did to perform the upgrade. It's that simple.

New Lupine and Ay-Up

This week we had a visit from both UPS and FedEx. Anytime that happens, it's a good week. Especially when what they bring are lights.

First up, Lupine.

Rather than send along totally new lights, Lupine sent us the upgrades for the Wilma and Betty.

I haven't installed the new emitters, yet, but I'll document the process when I do. Like I did with the last upgrade kit we looked at. I should have that up shortly after MLK Day.

Next up, Ay-Up.

Ay-Up sent us their latest in a killer box. Their new case is the toughest I've seen, by far. I'd have no problem dropping this thing off the roof of a moving car*. It's that tough.

This is their V4 Adventure kit and comes with two light heads, two bar mounts, a helmet mount, the Gecko battery mount, headband and three batteries. Oh... and the Saxon cap, to turn the lights red. The charger can charge two of those at once.

The lights included in the kit are the same intermediate and narrow beams that we looked at last winter. They also sent a wide beam light head, so I'll have that in the beam shots, too. The batteries are their new High-Low-Flash batteries. No longer are they just on/off.

Low

I've been asked to determine the run time of the Magicshine on low. And so I did. But before we go there, I'll explain why I normally don't do run times on any setting other than High.

First, it takes a very long time. Running the lights on high allows me to test more than one in an evening. The low beams can literally run all night.

Second, the data is noisy. Very noisy. This is due to what's call pulse width modulation. Essentially, the lights are not dimmed like a light in your house, but are turning off and on very, very fast. This can yield interesting results.

The voltage from the photo-voltaic cell--the lights shine on the cell and I log the cell's output voltage--started out looking like this:

The horizontal spacing is 0.333 seconds per square. So here, the computer is sampling the light very quickly, 240 times per second.

Once the light warmed up, the pattern settled to look like this:

Our eyes cannot see this pattern--though sometimes it appears to give a spinning tire the "strobe" effect.

The problem with this is that for graphing purposes, I log every minute. Depending on where in the cycle the light is, this could be at a peak, a trough, or somewhere in between. This results in a graph that looks like this:

As you can see, it's a jumbled mess. However, the light ended up lasting a whopping 14 hrs and 10 minutes before shutting off.

If you are walking, you could use the light to walk all night long. If you aren't riding singletrack and/or are doing a lot of slow speed climbing, dropping the light to low will really extend your riding time.

WIWTBT Vol. 11

Wow. Winter again. For some reason, while I'm enjoying beautiful mountain passes on my road bike or pristine singletrack on my mountain bike in the Summer and Autumn seasons here in Utah, I forget about Winter. Winter can really suck. If I do nothing, I get fat[er] and lazy[er] and, most importantly, slow[er]. What's worse, I never really got fast this year, so I know that if I let myself slack off over the winter months, I'll be super slow. This is not good.

Of course, there are things I can do. I can do some cross-training (read: not cycling). I can get on my rollers more often. Ultimately, of course, the best solution is to spend a lot of money to solve my problem.

Which brings me to what I currently want to buy. This:

(photo courtesy of Speedway Bicycles)

I give you, the FatBack. Yes, it is a snow bike. Very similar, in fact, to the Pugsley I reviewed a couple of seasons ago. There are a few differences, though. Most notably is the complete lack of asymmetry. That is, instead of using asymmetric wheels (with the stays and fork matching) in order for the chain to clear the tires, the FatBack uses a 160mm rear hub and a 135mm front hub. Wide. Fat. Good for snow.

But, I'm not really willing to stop there. Oh no. I also want to build up a second set of wheels (with similarly-sized hubs, of course). This second set, however, will be built with some Stans 29er rims (which would fit nicely in this frame). A second set of rotors bolted to these wheels would be nice, too.

See, it's hard to justify a bike just for the dark, dismal winter months. So, why not spend even more money to get a bike that's Mr. Hyde in the Winter, and Dr. Jekyll in the Summer?

Cue the evil laughter in the background.