Lights

the RSP Astrum is awesome. unfortunately i lost one recently because the plastic bracket snapped off.
B&M on the other hand is starting to piss me off. they haven't been able to produce a durable or
serviceable rear light for over a decade now. I currently have this one:

you can see the round capacitor for the standlight in the middle. unfortunately it is only held
in place by a tiny bent piece of metal and the pressure from the closed case. After a few weeks
of riding the standlight stopped working. (great if you rely on it in traffic).
The capacitor had slipped off the electrical contacts. Since the case is just glued shut
I had to break it open with a knife, put the capacitor back and fix it in place with a piece of string.

Now this DiY job worked well for a few months but now the light starts cutting off again while riding. utter piece of shit.
Oh yeah...and a €25 price turns into £39 here.
garbage

can the hope district rear light be mounted to a rack?

RSP set from JE James arrived - well chuffed, very good for the money

Something similar to this (but with more hipster cred) was posted a while back. I feel like this is a slightly more credible (and practical?) product though as it actually projects the light forward and backwards… a bit pricey for me but I like the effective size of the light you get with them. Sorta like having a huge fibre flare on your wheel? (click through the link for a full video etc etc, I had a search on the forum and I don't think this is a repost).

Repost. ;-)

One page back. But your post is more visual.

D'oh! Not in this thread, surely?

Also bought the Astrum from Wittons 14.91 including postage.
Its BRIGHT.
And why didnt anyone (incl. the product description) mention the 2 different lenses on the 2 LED's? the one with clear lens is more focused for distant visibility, and the one with a diffuser gives it a wider angle close-up. Ingenious and elegant idea IMO.

The RSP Astrum is nearly impossible to turn on by accident. The (very stiff) button is between the two lights, and it needs a very firm push to turn on. Its also one of the very best rear lights available.

I said all this a year and a half ago. :]

#strop

I've just ordered a '900 lumen' P7 SSC front light thing from China through eBay. A housemate just ordered the same thing from DealExtreme so it'll be interesting to see if...

Either work,
If either of us get a refund if/when they fail,
How long they take to arrive.

exposure joystick 2 plus maxx rear light write up.

i've had the exposure joystick 2 plus the maxx red rear plug in light, since july last year...

thought i'd update this thread regarding the exposure joystick and maxx rear light bought new in july 2009. i had to send it off to exposure to have the dry joint investigated early this year. they fixed it and sent it back to me really promptly.

it's not been used too much this summer, and got its first proper use a few weeks back. it charges fine, works really well holding a good charge, and i see no reason why it won't go through this winter like it did last year.

pretty good considering it's now 2 1/2 years old now!

J.E.James have a deal on a RSP front/rear combo that I couldn't resist. The front light is 3 watt jobbie , and the rear is a good 1/2 watt light. It was only £12.95 so it was a must-buy. And I bought the RSP Astrum along with it. £25.oo for 3 lights can't be bad; especially as one is a 3 watt front light. Thats me sorted for the winter.
A 3 watt front light has been rated from different sources, as between 120 lumens to 200 lumens. Either way, this is a superb deal.

Bought and installed. Very bright indeed, great value. Thanks for the tip.

RSP set from JE James arrived - well chuffed, very good for the money

Bought and installed. Very bright indeed, great value. Thanks for the tip.

You are both very welcome.

Bought and installed.

Ditto.

The rear looks identical to the Smart 0.5W which usually goes for £12-£13 on it's own, the front is also available on it's own as Lifeline at http://www.wiggle.co.uk/lifeline-1w-led-front-light/
for £10.79

The rears don't interest me much since I already have loads of different ones laying around, but the fronts are OK - put 2 on the Pompetamine and went for a short ride on the unlit path by the Jubilee River, not really up to the kind of speed I do in daylight training rides but more than enough for transport duty.

So for £26 total, I now have 2 torches which will allow me to experiment with night rides before deciding whether to spend ~£200 on something nice, and another 2 spare rear lights (one of which has gone on miss.ua's bike)

they must have updated the blurb on the packaging :}

I said all this a year and a half ago. :]

#strop

mdcc_tester that Lifeline light is a 1 watt unit, and the RSP from J.E.James is a 3 watt (200 lumens) affair.

So they say; the output would suggest otherwise, & if it really was 3W, it would drain the battery in about 90 mins.

Just got my lifeline 1W delivery. Decided two of them would look better than one. Symmetry ftw.

1 light / 2 lights in a completely dark bedroom.

the exposure on the camera is pretty normal i'd say (meaning: this is pretty much how it looked with my eyes)

I recently got a Moon 2.0 front light off amazon for £12.50

I have been looking for a decent light that is rechargeable but not with some shitty system like the Blackburn ones. This one uses a standard mini usb cable to charge, takes about 2 hours and lasts for about 7. It's got 3 LED' with 16-19 Lumen output. 240-270 LUX at 1m (numbers taken from amazon).
Another thing I like about it is the rubber strap attachment seems very robust, it pivots around the attachment point and doesn't look like it's going to snap like my Skully and Blackburn lights have. It's also pretty damn small, about the size of a matchbox. It's bloody cheap too. I've not tried it in the rain yet, but so far everything is positive and I would recommend it any day.

I got a set of those £1.50 eBay lights a couple of months ago and I'm actually really impressed, they're pretty bright, certainly bright enough for just getting about on the relatively well lit streets of Bournemouth and Southampton. The only problems I've encountered are that the mounts are a bit crap and the rear light tends to turn itself on in my bag, but apart from that, for £5 posted they're pretty bitching!

Watch out for these. (http://www.parkersofbolton.co.uk/p-2175-moon-gem-20-usb-recharge-rear-led-light-black.aspx)

The design is perfect for a front light, but in order to get a rear light they just switched the lens to something red, and that's a problem.

The reason it's not suited as a rear light is that the cutouts on the body that enable it to be seen from the side (when it's being used as a front light), can't be seen as a back light because of the vertical vs horizontal mounting. If it's mounted on something horizontal (eg handlebars), the cutouts are visible. If it's mounted on a vertical part of the frame, the cutouts only are visible from the top or bottom.

I wrote to the distributors and they said they'd take them back, redeem the postage and send me something else (they also amended the listing to remove "side visibility"). I wrote to the manufacturers (http://www.moon-sport.com/) and they wrote back with a hilarious thankyou in Chinglish.

Apart from that, with its USB chargeability, it's a bloody marvel.

I think I'll replace it with either the Gem USB 3.0 or this impressive beast.

The RSP Astrum is nearly impossible to turn on by accident. The (very stiff) button is between the two lights, and it needs a very firm push to turn on. Its also one of the very best rear lights available.

I rode home with someone who have that light on the back on strobe.

fucking blinded me, not recommended for city.

The design is perfect for a front light, but in order to get a rear light they just switched the lens to something red, and that's a problem.

See my earlier post - it is a bad design for seat post mounting, but it's great if you can get it on the saddle rails. Also, even mounted vertically, the off axis light out to about ±60° is better than some other compact lights, even if it does drop off to zero at ±90°

I rode home with someone who have that light on the back on strobe.

fucking blinded me, not recommended for city.

hope it wasnt me :P
anyways will dip it down a bit.

Hah! it was you actually! to be fair it wasn't your fault, and I almost crashed into the back of a veedubs after riding too close to you in Brighton trying to get away from the sheer number of idiots taking their cages.

That's why I like the Smart Lunar R1 light I had (not the one on my bike), it have a group mode, i.e. dimmed so it won't blinded people from behind.

forgive me if this has been covered, i haven't read through the back pages

i'm after a front light that attaches to the underside of the stem. it must be battery (AA/AAA) powered. any thoughts?