I'm a fan of night riding and I've benefited from the evolution of battery and light technologies over the past 30 years: from lead-acid battery-powered halogen lamps back in the 90's, to HID lamps through the 00's powered by NiMh's, and now high-output LED lights with li-ion batteries for the past decade. The lights and batteries have become progressively better, lighter, and more efficient over the years. The tech will certainly continue to improve but, at this point, riding even technical offroad terrain at night is limited more by my skill than my ability to see.
However, despite how efficient the newest LED lamps have become, powering them over a multi-day(night) bikepacking ride or ultra-endurance race is still a challenge. You typically have one of three options, each with their own limitations:
- carry enough batteries to last the duration of night riding. Downside: requires valuable space; once you've drained the batteries, you're out of light.
- run a dynamo and dynamo-powered lamp. Downside: beam quality may be poor and/or reduced light output at low riding speeds.
- run a dynamo and recharge a battery-powered lamp. Downside: most battery-powered lamps draw more current than a dynamo supplies, so there's a risk you might eventually drain the battery.
- don't ride at night. That's not an option.
An inherent downside with all three options is weight. Extra batteries, a high-capacity battery or a cache battery adds weight...but, a dynamo hub also carries a weight-penalty over a standard hub. A loaded bike is already a tank, so I generally don't quibble too much over weight. However, I pack light and often don't have room to spare for multiple battery packs or a 20Ah cache battery, especially if it's going to displace clothing or food. Likewise, I'm not a fan of the dynamo-specific lighting options that are on the market. Most are over-glorified LED flashlights, and the reduction in light output at low speeds -such as what you experience when riding technical singletrack- is a non-starter.
I've been playing with the Outbound Lighting Hangover lamp since late 2019.
Literally. Here, I'm running this in my office to record the run-time with USB power.
Outbound Lighting offers some of the best optics on the market. It's a small company founded by automotive lighting engineers, and made in the USA. Their smallest lamp, the Hangover, has a beam pattern/quality that's better than any dynamo-specific lamp I've seen. Unfortunately, the internal battery of the Hangover is a single 18650 li-ion (early versions had a 3.2Ah battery; they currently ship with a 3.5Ah battery), which lasts a bit over 6 hours on its low beam setting. Using it for 12+ hours of night riding (up to multiple days/nights) requires a heavy and bulky cache battery to pass-thru charge the light. But, what if you could use multiple 18650's batteries (or higher-capacity batteries)???
A basic splitter for powering multiple lamps is a convenient source for the sealed connectors for this project.
The Hangover opened up. I've removed its 18650 battery and replaced it with a power cable and male connector.
The battery will be relocated to within the steerer tube of my bicycle fork. The stem top-cap and the expanding plug for the steerer need to be modified to route the power cable.
Drill a small-diameter pilot hole into the top of the expanding plug.
Step up the drill-size to increase the diameter of the hole. Deburr the hole afterwards.
Voila!
Repeat with the bottom of the expanding plug.
Power cable routed through the expanding plug; doesn't bind within the holes or interfere with the wedge.
Top cap is modified similarly.
I drilled the hole oversized to fit a rubber grommet in a half-baked attempt to 'weatherize' the setup.
Woot!
Cable with female connector for the battery-side, getting components ready to assemble. I have 'tinned' the wire with solder to make the soldering process a bit quicker/easier.
Route the cable through the top-cap and expanding plug (not pictured), and slide on shrink-wrap before you solder...this also limits how much heat you can put into the wire. Know what you're doing here as there isn't much room to correct mistakes.
To reduce the strain on the soldered joints (including where the wires are soldered to the battery) my suggestion is to run the wiring alongside the battery...
...and shrink-wrap it together.
The assembled battery is hidden within the steerer tube of the fork.
Dynamo charging a light through USB is tricky, as there is a negotiation between device and charger depending on available current. Dynamos do not produce constant current because your riding speed constantly varies, and most dynamo chargers do not have the circuitry to renegotiate and maximize charging current. That said, the
Igaro S1 Pro dynamo charger is claimed to be capable of doing exactly that, and I've found it produces enough current to extend the Hangover though 12+ hours of continuous use with minimal charging time afterwards (i.e. daytime riding) to top off the battery. At least when used on low and limited medium outputs, it is suitable for multi-day rides (in Florida) without plugging in to the grid to charge.
You might wonder then why did I bother to remove the internal battery? The clear limitation of the Hangover is its internal battery...once its drained -a few hours of medium or high output usage will do this- you're done for the night. The dynamo output cannot charge a dead battery and power the Hangover simultaneously, even on low output, so I need the ability to swap to a fresh battery if this were to occur (thus, I carry a spare 18650 battery). You could argue that a USB-C cache could address this issue without having to modify the Hangover as I've done here. Cache batteries are heavy and bulky, and I wouldn't be carrying it for any other reason...conversely, my spare 18650 is lightweight and takes up minimal space.
If your equipment doesn't work for you, make it work. Or replace it. The reward for making the Hangover work is better than the alternatives.
