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FireBalls CompLight- a serious
lighting unit which wouldn't look out of place on a kustom bike. Cast aluminum housing, 32-12 watt units for hi-low lighting. comes with 14.4 volt, 4.1 Amp hour Nickel Metal Hydride batteries with integrated fuel gauge+charger.
$200 from Specialized
JC Whitney's Lowball 55-watt Backup Light
Chrome Housing $12.99.
There's More; Go To:
BigBeam Emergency Light
Lowrider Bullet Headlight
Cateye Hyper Halogen Light,
$24.95 from Nashbar
Hella 20-watt Backup Light
ProComp PC55 off-road
Auxiliary Driving Lights
Hella 105 Driving Light from
Susquehanna
Above and Below:
tractor headlights from
Battery Lantern
Bates-style motorcycle
headlight, about $100 from
Jim Wilson- Building a Serious Lighting System For Your KustomBike-
Part One: Functional Headlighting
For most KustomBikes, the ideal light is one which would not look out of place on a small HotRod- a chrome bullet-shaped housing is the ideal. There is only one headlight available through bicycle sources which fills this bill.  It's the kind you see on all those LowRider show bikes. You can find it for about $15. If you shop around, you can find it for $20; and if you shop around really hard, you might be able to find it for $10. It's a fairly nice-looking light, with decent chromium plating.  Unfortunately, it's of very  lightweight (flimsy) construction; and its lamp is powered by two AA penlight batteries. Under actual road use, the thing will fall apart in no time, and it puts out about the same amount of candle-power as Barbie's Designer MagLite.  My friend Willy has a term for this sort of product: Full-Scale Replica.
Left: These Lowrider Headlights are attractive, but their low power and flimsy materials make them unsuitable for real world bike lighting tasks. They are eminently suitable for decorating children's vehicles, however.
Bugatti Type59 replica pedalcar by Jim Wilson,
Photography by Michael Frost.
There are serious bike lights out there, of course, but they cost a fortune, and if they really do the job,  they invariably look like a black bar of soap with a window. There are some KustomBikes on which this might be the right look, but not many. These high-end functional headlights generally draw 15 watts of power, or less. Bike Police lighting is generally mandated at 15 watts, since it must be truly functional. In comparison, that cute chrome replica bullet light on the market pulls about 2-3 watts, which will give you an idea of its level of functionality.   You could spend $200 for the real one, and another $20 for the cute one, and rip the guts out of the cute one and stick the functional one inside it, of course.  Then you would have an expensive headlight which actually works, inside an appropriate-looking flimsy housing which is virtually guaranteed to fall apart soon. And it still won't look right, what with that black bar of soap where one would normally expect to see a parabolic reflector and bulb.

What to do? Maybe it's time to step out of the bike box, and explore other lighting sources. There are three areas in which lights similar to what we need may possibly be found. First is emergency lighting. These are the boxes seen on the inner walls of public and commercial buildings. The boxes contain batteries, and there are generally two light heads fixed to the top of the boxes. In the past, the housings of these light heads were of the right shape, pretty much, and quite often chrome-plated. No more, unfortunately. Nowadays, the preferred finish is beige, and the material is plastic. There may be one out there that looks right, but we haven't found it yet. 

Another possibility is the battery lantern. In the past, there was a common type which had a chrome light head attached to an enclosure for a large dry-cell battery.  These have mostly fallen to the modern styling trends, and don't look right, anymore. There's one exception we have found. It's called the Big-Beam battery lantern.  Unfortunately, the maker's site has no information as to how one can go about acquiring one, and we've never actually seen one in a hardware store. They might do the job, though, but they look expensive, being serious emergency gear; and giving them a proper bike mounting might be problematic.
Our third area of investigation is probably the most promising: lights for other vehicles. They have several promising aspects. Being designed for motor vehicle usage , they are bound to be functional and reasonably sturdy. Most like the bicycle, in lighting application, is the motorcycle. These tend to be large, when in the right style, and expensive. Remember when poor people drove motorcycles, and rich people drove expensive automobiles? Neither do I, but there was such a time, believe me. Now, the general idea seems to be that the rich drive fine automobiles and, just for kicks, also have an expensive motorcycle or two in the garage.  The poor drive cheap old automobiles or take the bus, it seems. Buying moto hardware, such as  a headlight is a very price-y proposition, nowadays. You might as well shop at a yacht chandlery.  We have no recommendations for these.

Still in the running is the garden tractor headlight. We can remember seeing many lights like this in the past. They were generally fitted with small sealed-beam lamps, were compact and, quite often, available with chrome-plated housings. Except for the chrome part, this is still true.  And, the best part: they're really cheap.  If you can get past the lack of brightwork, you can stop right here. We show two examples, both by Peterson Mfg., from the Northern Supply & Equipment catalog. The rectangular one is 3X5", and draws 55 watts. It costs a measly $17.99. The housing is of polycarbonate (Lexan) and is therefore paintable. The round one costs $10.99, and is 4.75" in diameter. Unfortunately, the housing is covered in black rubber, and therefore, not paintable. There is however, a rationale for this as a styling feature- it matches the tires. The round one has no listed wattage rating, but it may be safely assumed that it's between 15-20 watts. This range of power is at least in the range of a modern police bike's, so it would certainly be adequate.  Too bad about the chrome. For that you have to go to the automotive dept.

The auto-parts catalog heading for what we want is "Auxiliary Driving/Fog Lights". These are available in chrome, and are quite powerful, at 55 watts minimum. I have been told that the headlights of a normal economy car are typically rated at 35 watts, so these 55-watt bad boys are powerful indeed. They are commonly billed as "off-road" lights, because they are considered hazardously bright for road use.  For bike use, they would normally be aimed at a considerably lower angle than on a car, so they would not be as likely to blind oncoming traffic. In bicycling safety circles, there's no such thing as being too visible; so 55-watt lights are a big plus, from the seeing-and-being-seen perspective. These lights are mostly fitted with H3-type halogen lamps, which also come in a couple of higher power ratings. There are none less powerful, which is unfortunate for those who would like long battery life from a compact power source.  There are quite a few makers and sources for this type of light, even if you insist on chrome, round-lensed, sort-of-bullet-shaped ones.

We found two examples on-line in this category. The more expensive one is by Hella. It looks right, uses the H3 55-watt halogen lamp, and costs $87.95.  It would be easy to mount to a bike. The size is 5" diameter. This is larger than the more inferior bike bullet light, which is about 3.5", but it is not necessarily bad because of that.  There are many, ourselves included, who think that 5" is the perfect size, and that the bike-oriented unit is a dinky, inferior, imitation.

Using the Hella unit's size and specs as a benchmark, we continued looking. We got lucky, and found these units by ProComp. They cost $19.95, are 5" in diameter, are chrome-plated, and are vaguely bullet-shaped.  And they use that same 55-watt H3 halogen bulb. As Hella will be the first to tell you, relative quality in a light of this nature is mostly a matter of reflector efficiency; and these babies are way more efficient than we actually need on a bike. And, as the ProComps have to survive being fastened to off-road vehicles, they can probably survive potholes on a bike as well as the more expensive ones.

The rectangular alternative:
Hella, the high-priced spread in our previous go-thru, has one market advantage- a lighting unit no one else seems to offer. The Hella back-up light lives within a chrome-plated housing, but also only sucks-up 20 watts of power, which is a good power rating for bike lighting.
The rectangular shape, while not appealing to retro types, would look mighty fine on a modern chopper, and it's priced at $36.77.
Bates-style motorcycle
headlight, about $100 from
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Battery Lantern
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Above and Below:
tractor headlights from
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Hella 105 Driving Light from
Susquehanna
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ProComp PC55 off-road
Auxiliary Driving Lights
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Hella 20-watt Backup Light
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Cateye Hyper Halogen Light,
$24.95 from Nashbar
Lowrider Bullet Headlight
BigBeam Emergency Light
There's More; Go To:
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Bicycles are vehicles. Vehicles have lighting systems. Kustom bikes are creative, ultra-refined vehicles; therefore they should also have lighting systems. Unfortunately, Kustom bikes have a nasty set of standards for lighting systems. Here's the dilemma: the lighting system on a Kustom bike needs to look right. And tied in with the HotRod way of thinking, it also has to work right.
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JC Whitney's Lowball 55-watt Backup Light
Chrome Housing $12.99.
FireBalls CompLight- a serious
lighting unit which wouldn't look out of place on a kustom bike. Cast aluminum housing, 32-12 watt units for hi-low lighting. comes with 14.4 volt, 4.1 Amp hour Nickel Metal Hydride batteries with integrated fuel gauge+charger.
$200 from Specialized