I'm thinking of purchasing the following, for use on a bike, as headlights/handlebar lights. does anyone have any experience with them? or know anything at all about them? or atleast know enough to point me in the reasonably right direction? All of these come from the same place... and do seem quite a bit cheaper than i've been able to find them (if at all) in other places (including flea-bay) 1400lumen (claimed) LED headlight Suspiciuosly cheap Torch mount #1 900 lumen two mode torch Suspiciously cheap torch mount #2 Plus, appropriate 18650 Li-on batteries, chargers and where needed a UK plug converter for the chargers. The idea is to mount the magicshine (36018) on the dérailleur extension tube (on a recumbent this is pretty much the furthest forward thing on the bike, other than the peddle on your lead foot!) then mount two of the 900w torches on the ends of the handlebars, . this way i get a nice flood facing dead ahead, and get a wider flood that points where I'm going. In fact for £18 i may even get 3 and stick one on my helmet too.. or is 1400+900+900+900 excessive?
More light = better, always. Particularly on a 'bent when your visibility to drivers is reduced anyway. If I were going to ride a 'bent at night it would be lit up like a fairground. Cree and known for making good high power emitters, if you buy a torch with a cree LED you should be fairly sure of getting the rated output. Moriquendi
I know quite a lot about LEDs. First of all, I'm an electronic engineer, so it's in my best interests to know and secondly, I'm a keen high performance LED flashlight user and collector, and am fairly close to knowing anything that's worth knowing regarding high performance emitters like the SSC P7 that both the flashlights you've linked to use. The suspiciously cheap torch mount #1 looks (suspiciously) identical to the Fenix flashlight mount that I use to mount my Fenix TK11 on the handlebars of my bike. It was less than £5 as well, so the suspiciously cheap part is nothing to worry about. As far as the flashlights go, you're really not going to see much quality for $30 on the MTE. $120 for the headlight is much more like it. With high performance flashlights, the rule of thumb is you get what you pay for, and I have lights that cost well in excess of $200 and can't produce 900 lumens OTF. The 900 lumens that is being stated is more than likely at the emitter, for about 5 minutes. The MTE doesn't look or sound like it features either of the two things that are important with high performance LED flashlights that run on lithium ion cells - regulation circuitry or thermal protection. You could also tag reverse polarity onto that list but I've never put a cell into any of the 30 or so high performance lights I own the wrong way, so for those who aren't idiots that feature is kind of moot. The other two are important though. Regulation ensures that you get a constant output until the cell can't provide enough power to drive the emitter at the current output mode level and shuts the light off to protect the LED and the cell from over-discharge, which can easily damage an LED and the cell. Thermal protection does the same thing - it protects both the LED and the cell from excessive heat. Until you've held a P7 driven light at max output for 5 minutes or so, you won't know how hot high performance emitters can get, but take it from me that if that light doesn't have thermal protection circuitry, it'll overheat and be damaged after the first few uses. Lastly, 1400+900x3 is definately excessive. Very excessive. What you'd be better doing is buying one good light for the middle of the bars and getting that headlamp. Like I said, I run a Cree Q5 Fenix TK11 on an 18650 with a soft diffuser to reduce the intensity of the spot in the middle of my bars. That's about 220 lumens for an hour and it doesn't have regulation (early TK11 model) so it just gets gradually dimmer. It'll give me about 2 hours of usable light before I have to change the cell. I always carry a spare. 220 is just about right for me. More than enough light to let people know I'm coming and plenty to let me see everything in front of me. I have a remote pressure switch tailcap on the TK11, with the switch mounted on the left handle. It's not necessary but it means I can switch the light on and off comfortably. If you need more advice or second (and third, and fourth and so on) opinions on any of this, you should register on candlepowerforums.com. You have no idea how helpful the people on there are and you will probably be amazed at how big a "hobby" high performance lighting actually is. Many of the guys on CPF have made a career out of testing, manufacturing or just selling high performance lights to everyone from the public to the military and quite a few of those guys have made it their life's work to improve the design and functionality of flashlights to levels you wouldn't believe. [edit] Sorry I forget I'm not posting on CPF when talking about lights sometimes: OTF - Out the front. Amount of light output measured after light has hit the reflector and passed through the lens of the flashlight. Always much lower than the "at the emitter" output which is often misleadingly quoted in advertising for high performance lights. Case in point - the MTE flashlight that you linked to. 900 lumens for $30? No chance. Cree Q5 & SSC P7 - Two popular types of high performance LED or "emitter". Cree and SSC (Seoul Semiconductor) are the manufacturers. Cell - technically, rechargeable Li-Ion "batteries" are referred to as Lithium cells. Please also excuse my very "American" way of referring to torches as flashlights or just lights. If you say "torch" on CPF they think you're talking about a big stick that's on fire, so it's just through habit that I refer to them as flashlight
