The Tuesday night ride is a long standing tradition here at Industry Nine. Charge the lights and then charge the trails of the Pisgah National Forest. And we always cap off the night with a feast at the trailhead. Long live the Tuesday Night Supper Club!
105 Comments
Rad video!!! I love Asheville!
My wife is fairly new to mountain biking and loving it (19 years of marriage and she finally gets it!). She had, however, never been on a night ride until last weekend when we hooked up with the local Evergreen chapter here in WA to ride the Pope trails in Kitsap. 28 riders dressed in costume on an hour and a half-ish ride with the moon up and clear skies. She started off nervous and about 1 minute in was grinning ear to ear. Hooked.
Seriously though has anyone tried www.brite-r.com . I'm on a budget so can't fork out hundreds of £££ for a set of lights.
This is why I went back to my home made lights (Lumicycle casings, battery and charger) because they work.
If I were buying another I would get one from a company (Brite-R or C and B Seen) so you can get spares.
I would look into some single-cell cable-free lights, like the Light & Motion Trail 1000 FC Ranger (or the Urban 900 for something that is nearly identical for $50 less) for a light helmet light that will last long enough if you manage the brightness when you're climbing.
And for awareness sake: Brite-R is rebranded cheap Chinese garbage. If you want to roll the dice and slowly throw money on lights that are much, much dimmer than rated, have reliability issues, and have a history of shipping 4-cell battery packs with 2 failed cells in them, go for it, but if you're spending tons of money on bikes then you should spend more than a few $ on a light. M2C
1. Bar Light - High power, wide (read: elliptical) beam, spill around the front tire but not up in the sky, not a ton of throw down the trail, more a wall of light.
2. Helmet Light - ~50% of the total lumens of the bar light, narrow/focused beam.
Reasoning: Bars waver around a ton, makes no sense to have a really spotty beam on the bars unless you're on a drag strip. In the woods or on techy climbs you just get a spot of ground lit up and whenever you move that spot goes completely dark, which is frustrating on top of seriously messing with your night vision. If you have a more uniform, even spill of light that will reduce the wavering effect on your eyes, let you see around corners better, and dramatically reduce eye fatigue. The major benefit of a bright bar light is also shadows, since the light source is well away from your eyes and will make roots/rocks/drops all look bigger/less washed out.
Helmet lights go where you look, so it makes sense for them to be pretty focused, especially when paired with a wide bar light. As such, you don't need nearly as many lumens as the bar, because when tightly focused the intensity (what your eye perceives as "brightness") is much higher, so you can have a narrow helmet beam with half the power input still have a visible bright spot in the field of view. This allows you to turn your head to fill in parts of the trail where you need it, be that looking around corners or throw down the trail at high speed. Keeping the power down from the bars prevents the trail from getting washed out by a light source next to your eye (no shadows = no depth at night) and allows you to keep the larger, heavier light on the bars instead of your helmet.
Anyways, wordy response, but I wanted to share. Hope this helps some
My current setup works pretty well but if I need another light I may go with C and B Seen which are a little more expensive but look a bit more legit.
I should also add that I got that Lupine set as a present so it wasn't even necessarily my conscious choice. But it made me realize what a cool company they are and they were great when I needed to buy a new battery.
@HuckGnarris : This is pretty much my setup too. I've got diffuser lens on the handlebar mounted light, the helmet light is tighter. I have the batteries attached to the helmet too so I have no issues with cables between camelbak and helmet.
C&B Seen is an odd one, as their product is so aggressively priced it seems like it would be in the same category of the Brite-Rs and others, but the website conveys that it was started in someone's garage. Might be OK, but I'd be a bit wary, as they sell light heads with no battery packs, but then somehow state run times in the specs. Also it looks a bit industrial with the mounts and if you get the remote control option there is no way to mount the remote, seems like it is a light system that is not particularly well thought through....but I've never touched one, so I say you get one and report back, haha. Curious what their build quality is like.
As for mounts I am currently using a modded GoPro helmet mount for my lights on my Super 2R. Its great as I leave the mount on the helmet and then bolt the lights on when needed. I would probably do the same with a C and B Seen if I ever bought one.
My experience with them is good though. They have been responsive and everything works. I can't say anything about whether the output is as rated but it is well bright enough for me. I rarely use full power simply because the stuff I ride is so tight and twisty it doesn't make sense to look that far ahead anyway
Oh yeah, and you can buy empty battery cases in which you put 18650 batteries so I suppose the chances of poor wiring there should be slim. Also great because I'm from The Netherlands and shipping a full battery overseas is much more expensive because of the risks and regulations involved.
Lupine makes a remote for the Piko, which is not really any more obtrusive than the Neo, is actually slightly shorter, just wider. Granted it's a good bit more expensive, but that's an option at least. I think they just ran out of space to fit the Bluetooth control module in the Neo.
Yeah Lupine does the remote for Piko and onwards but it can't be retrofitted to my older Piko so it is no option for me. But yeah of course anyone after a really compact helmet light (and potentially a helmet mounted battery too) and who also needs the remote is well served with the Piko. I love mine. The C and B seen lights are already much larger than the Piko.
I like that Sigma actually tries to educate on beam and the difference between lumens and lux on their website. The optic used in the Buster 2000 is good (LEDiL CUTE-3) and I've used it on a few homemade helmet lights in the past. That said, the light head is bulky, particularly with the mounting system, and the user interface is finicky. Still a much better option than $25 Amazon lights, that's for sure.
My brother has the R4 same amazing build quality and still plenty bright and it's much smaller and lighter that the R8, it all really depends on the type of riding you do at night, the R8 is bright enough to ride full on DH trails, if you want I can upload some beam shots to my profile
Also, you run the R8+ on the helmet? I can't even find a mount or image of one ever mounted on the helmet, the cross-section of the light head is HUGE for helmet mounting! Does it not bother you? You don't clip tree branches constantly with it? Pretty common around here, maybe you don't have as many trees in your area though.
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