Winter Lighting Setup

• Minoura suggests mounting its Besso adaptors as close to the front axle as possible, but I find that mid-way up the fork is more practical, as it allows careful riders to operate lights on the fly. Now, Minoura is one of my very favorite companies, but it does have a very off tendency to mix alphanumeric product names with semi-onomatopoeic or entirely nonsensical ones. It is a company that makes some of the most interesting "lifestyle" accessories on the market; items such as a spring-loaded rack-top basketball carrier; not one, not two, but three different cage designs for folks who insist on drinking from screw-top bottled waters; and multi-tools that look like iMacs from 1997. That "besso" usually refers to a summer cottage, and not a handy-dandy fork-mounted light holder, should therefore come as no surprise.

  This dang early evening darkness really gets my goat, but I suppose it's just another excuse to fiddle with the winter roadie's setup. For symmetry: a pair of bessos, mounted mid-fork. I already have a dynohub-powered bike, and another with a bottle generator, so this one would surely be running on batteries. The starboard lamp would be a tiny-and-trusty Cateye EL-410, an 88g bundle of joy. You don't see this light used much these days, except as a helmet light. I think that's because, as a 3-LED headlamp, it's somewhat expensive -- but that's only because, like many Cateye products, it's overburdened with technology most consumers really don't understand. Indeed, if you just need some basic visibility, a white Knog Frog will do the job just fine, at a third the price. But the secret to the EL410 is in its construction. It's only one of two Cateye headlights that are submersibly waterproof -- something that might not appear useful, until you use your lighting in a rainstorm... or better yet, condensation freezes into the lamp's internals, ruining the entire mechanism. So yeah, it's built very well. I use the EL410 for visibility, so I aim it slightly upwards, maybe 50 meters out, and keep it in blinking mode in order to conserve batteries and announce my arrival to pedestrians and drivers.

  On the port side I've got an EL-530, which is the undisputed champion in commuter lights. Like the EL-410, it is submersibly waterproof, though only to 30m (as opposed to 50m). I love that it actually *looks* like a proper lamp, with a splendidly flared and shiny lens. This light is massively bright, putting out 7,000 total candlepower and 1,658 at a distance of 10 meters. (That's nearly 10 times as bright as the EL-410!) As such, it rivals much more expensive rechargeable-halogen systems at being able to actually illuminate the road. I point mine slightly downwards, lighting the road about 10-15 meters ahead. You actually risk blinding oncomers if you aim it too high, so beware.

  Both lights use Cateye's magnetic switch system which, besides sounding cool, is also very practical. You don't need to crash in order to mangle a light, and usually this will result in a janky switch, which means game over for conventional lights. But not for the Cateyes! Bruce showed me how he carrries around a little magnet, which he waves over his EL-410 to turn it on and off after the switch broke. Getting lights off ones handebars and onto the frame is great, but things can be pretty messy down near the wheels; sand and salt dust, goose guano and bunches of ice will quickly find their way onto your lights. Switches can also easily freeze, something that I have already encountered more than once this winter. So besides being trick, this whole magnetic switch thing seems to have legs.

  This is a pretty versatile and lightweight setup. For dawn/dusk riding, it's starboard only. For true darkness, the port side kicks in. The lamps are light and small enough to keep on all the time, but thanks to the besso-mounts, they can be easily removed for faster daytime rides, or use on another bicycle. Cateye has finally updated their English-language website with an excellent comparison chart PDF of their entire headlight range.