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Thanks for your reply, it was super helpful. I had those exact questions about the Fairlight mount and the Son rear light beam pattern.
I saw the framebuilders yesterday, and ended up sticking with the mudguard solution after talking with them. On their own bikes, they tend to mount it at the dropout, for the same reasons as Fairlight, i.e. it's compatible with all configurations. However, they tend to use Supernova rear lights - whose beam pattern is apparently better for vertical mounting -. As I have an Edelux at the front, using a Supernova for the rear light would mean loosing the standlight function, which I'm not keen to do.
I also hadn't realised how big an area brazing damages : adding braze-ons or holes to have some sort of clean routing towards position n°3 would have meant repainting the whole seattube.
@Five-Hats : I'm going to use a Son coaxial connector between the BB and the mudguard, to make mudguard removal easy. I assume that's what you meant?
@Julien1A : I've heard of that, but I'm not sure it changes much : Son coax is a single "wire".
Veblen-
Julien1A’s post refers to using the frame as one conductor (with the light body being grounded to the frame) and a single wire as the other.
SON coaxial contains 2 conductors - the central wire surrounded by an insulator, and the ground wire wrapped around that in a spiral.
Adding the SON coaxial connectors requires soldering, and personally I found them fiddly little bastards but had no choice but to use them at the hub, so I could use the connection block, and to allow my charger to connect to the female coaxial connector as fitted on my Edelux. Elsewhere, I think crimped connectors are a better job.
Sergeant_Pluck
I went for option 3, attached to a rack mount, on my recent Surly Trucker rebuild.
Reasons:
So I elected to run the wire up the back of the seat tube. Because I won’t always have mudguards on this bike, I wanted to be sure the wire wouldn’t be vulnerable to damage from small stones etc so I used 3M adhesive cable clips and ran the wire inside some 3mm internal diameter plastic hose. Thought about the helicopter tape option instead but preferred that method.
I also have two Supernova gold connectors near the light at 3 in case I change my mind about the rack - I can easily add a short length of coax thus avoiding undoing the existing wire routing.
The bike is 1x11 so admittedly the lack of front mech makes it easier to get it tidy going up the seat tube.
I used another small bracket to allow me to make use of the piss-takingly expensive Fairlight mount. It’s a good location that will work fine under my seat pack (not shown).