I’m looking a bike light for use on country roads. The roads around here are mostly narrow and in in poor condition, and with times being hard the car drivers are slow to replace blown bulbs. So the wise cyclist wears a reflective jacket and has decent lighting.
The dedicated bike lights in the better shops look attractive: big battery pack down low, and a head mounted on the handlebars without the weight of batteries to make it jump around. However, many of those lights have weak LEDs, and the decent-looking one have silly prices. There’s not much under $100 that seems worth considering.
So I looked at the bike lights on FastTech, where the prices are less injurious. I quite liked the design of the SolarStorm X2 … but the only reviewer was unimpressed by quality of the battery pack (poorly sealed, with a cardboard insulator!), and I don’t like the idea of a cheap-and-nasty charger for LiIon batteries.
A further problem is that none of the dedicated bike lights specifies the colour bin, and that’s a big issue for me. This is a damp part of the world, and I find blueish LEDs rather useless in rain and mist. For any given output level, a neutral white (or even warmer) performs much better in practice.
So I think that a torch might be a better option. The Convoy torches from FastTech are beautifully-made, well-priced, and come in a decent choice of tints.
The first question with any of them is whether I can get a solid enough clamp to hold a torch securely on the handlebars with minimum wobble. Obviously, the lighter the torch, the less wobble … but the more secure the clamp, the better. Any suggestions on where to find a decent clamp?
The next question is which torch. I want a floody beam, so the C8 is out. That seems to leave a choice of S2/S3/S4/S5/S6/S7 or the heavier M1/M2. Any suggestions on which gives the best flood?
