Lighting the way

It must have been four years ago or so, this time of year, I got a phone call while cooking dinner from my best friend (now The Wife for those following the trail here). She was stranded at the corner of Cuesta and Miramonte in Mountain View, the point to which she had ridden on her commute that night before the ‘bottle cage battery’ for her light had died completely. It was a call for the SAG wagon as she had no desire to traverse across Mountain View in the dark with no means of illumination. I put aside dinner for a while to go pick her up, and to start a conversation that went on for a couple of weeks regarding strategies for commute lights.

The solution we came up with was simple, if a bit spendy. I outfitted her commute bike with a new front wheel, one built around the Schmidt Original Nabendynamo (SON) generator hub. I added a pair of halogen lights, a Busch & Müller Lumotec Oval and a Schmidt E6. The Lumotec provides a nice general light with a lot of spillover while the Schmidt has a bright, focused beam. The Lumotec has an LED that is charged while riding to provide some light while stopped at stop signs and lights, but for good measure I added a small CatEye EL-400 battery light as an additional light source and emergency flashlight. The setup has worked fine, almost flawless minus a couple of burned bulbs in almost 4 years of use. With this setup installed, The Wife needs to flip one small switch when it gets dark and she has sufficient light to get her home without worrying if her batteries will die along the way.The setup I bought for my best friend worked so well that I outfitted my commuter with a similar setup. About two years ago I swapped that setup over to my touring bike and outfitted the commuter with a generator light rig built around the much less expensive Shimano hub. Both work great, and I find it useful to have lighting at the flip of a switch any time of the year. We used them two and half years ago when touring in France and Spain to provide light in the numerous tunnels we had to negotiate.

The generator hub seems to evoke a lot of interest. I probably field an average to at least two questions a week on CalTrain about the hub and lights. The most common follow-up question, after ‘is that a generator hub?’ is ‘how much drag does it produce?’ The answer is ’slight’ (Shimano hub) to ‘barely notice it’ (SON hub); as someone who used to commute with a sidewall generator I understand the concern but drag is not an issue. About the only thing that will improve on the generator hub setup for commuting, in my opinion, is having reliable LED based lights that can be powered off the generator. That would negate the relatively minor burned-out bulb issue and make the setup virtually maintenance free.