Great minds think alike – shortly after I finished this post i read this blurb in a Rivendell weekly email:
Question of the week
I get a lot of good questions emailed every week and I’ve decided to answer them here, in case anybody else finds it useful. Here’s a good one:
Hi Will,
I was catching up on newsletters, and saw you’re putting dynamo lights on your new Clem. I’m doing the same thing. If you have time, I’d love to see how you run the wire to the rear light. This is my first experience with dynamo lights, and getting the wire to hug the frame and rear rack (Nitto 32R) nicely isn’t intuitive to me.
I do it quickly and sloppily, and I’m happy with that. I use thin black zip-ties and coil the wire around the housing or frame tubes. I was hunting around for a “clean” solution to routing wires back to a rear light when I realized that a thin zip-tie really can’t be improved on, and is in keeping with the spirit of having everything external and easily figured out. The one thing I do that can be considered a little fancier than what’s strictly required for the system to work is I put a dab of solder over the wire in the crimps. That way, I don’t have to worry about the wires ripping out if I yank a little too hard on the wire. Peter White has instructions on dyno wiring and crimping.
The Secuzed is the rear light of choice for Riv employees. It’s affordable, super bright, and stays on long after you’ve stopped moving too. Plus, I think it’s the only one we sell that isn’t specifically made to mount to a rear rack, and most of us are front-rackers.
The Secuzed’s included mounts work fine, but I prefer to find a bracket in Mark’s bin-o-stuff, bend it 90 degrees in the vice, and attach the light to the upper seatstay braze-on instead. If you don’t have a stash of random brackets, a hardware store will definitely have something you can use.
Then the next week Jan Heine did a journal post on setting up dynamo lights!
I suspect that there is something of a surge in sales of lighting systems around Christmas – I know that I got a hub for my Fuji that way. For what it’s worth the Peter White discussion is still the best.