Afterburner 02 tail light is nice-looking, has 2 hi-power LEDs "Photon Funnel" lens system $25 from Specialized |
Left: The ultimate use for a car tail-light is to recreate the car's actual form in a full- frame composite fairing. (From JimW' s SketchPad, which also gives a '59 Caddy suggestion.) |
Above and below from JC Whitney |
Above and below: '39 Ford and '59 Cadillac Repro Tail Lights from JC Whitney |
Above and below: Motorcycle Tail lights from Vehicle Wiring Products at various prices. |
Existing bike tail-lighting which actually works is pretty much the same as lighting up front. If it works well, it costs a fortune, and it invariably is alien-looking on a kustombike. Why current styling chose insectile as a design scheme is beyond me. Therefore, for appropriately-styled powerful rear lighting, with the possible exception of the Specilized Afterburner 02, we've again got to step out of the bicycle box to find what we want. First, we should look at the electrical considerations. Up front, we have a 55-watt bulb. This is considerable drain on a battery pack. Any way of getting the most light for the least power demand is best where we're concerned. Fortunately, our need coincides with the ready availability of LED auto lighting, which draws a lot less electrical current than a corresponding bulb. This has also happened in bike lighting, of course, but it's generally packaged as insect anatomy, so we don't want to pay for unsuitable-looking housings to throw away. In the truck accessory lighting line, are lots of LED arrays, in bare-bones form. Two examples are shown, both by Grote. The larger one contains 10 LEDs, and is 4" in diameter. The smaller is 2.5" in diameter and contains 4 LEDs. These LEDs are of the high-brightness type. Obviously, the bigger one is bound to put out a lot more light than the smaller one, which makes it more suited to tail-light usage. But, the smaller one is designed for use as a clearance light on a truck, so it's definitely going to be visible. These lights can be used as free-standing units, or they can be worked into a kustom-sculpted housing grafted onto the fender. A typical middle-weight fender is 2.5" wide. A fat fender is about 3". By wrapping the LED puck in cling film or mylar packing tape, you can build up a Bondo sculptured housing around it, then remove the puck for grinding and sanding operations on the housing. Before we leave the LED light source topic, we should note that you can build your own LED arrays in whatever form you want them. Radio Shack sells individual high-brightness LEDs, but they can be purchased in bulk from places like Digi-Key, for a much better price. Radio Shack and places like Digi-Key also carry perforated phenolic board. You cut the board to whatever shape and size light you want, then stuff as many LEDs into the board as you want, or can fit. The finished unit can then be cast into a solid chunk of red-colored resin. Epoxy is best for the purpose. You could conceivably cast a tail-light into a section of chrome-plated brass sink drain tubing. The end would be sanded and polished flat, and would look really good, as a pseudo tail-pipe deal. The LED modules can be used inside lighting units which originally were fitted with bulbs, in many cases. They don't need reflectors, and don't actually even require red lenses, as the light they produce starts out red. It would be possible to cast an array of these LEDs into a clear block of resin, and they would be virtually transparent until illuminated, at which point the block would glow red. For off-the-shelf tail-lights, motorcycle sources are probably the simplest. Quite a lot of motorcycle units can be fitted to bicycles. There are some nice ones out there, but they tend to be expensive. They also tend to contain provision for illuminating the license plate, which is sort of wasted on a bike. Many other examples may be seen at Vehicle Wiring Products . Automotive tail-lights are another good possibility for bike usage. Current automotive lighting is pretty much out of the question, what with those giant composite lighting schemes they have now. However, old auto tail lighting is a lot more expensive than it used to be, due to age and condition drawing big bucks from collectors and restorers. Fortunately, there are fairly cheap repros available of some of the classics. Our old standby, JC Whitney has repros of the '39 Ford and '59 Caddy units. The Ford repro is very popular with people kustomizing VW Beetles, giving us a reasonably-priced ($12.99 ), attractive unit which can be Bondo-molded to a fender. This would be a super-looking tail-light on a bike. The Caddy Bullet can be had with or without Blue Dot, at $19.99 or $24.99 for the lens assembly alone. The light bulb fixture for it goes for an additional $4.99. The Bullet lens is 3" in diameter, so a 2 or 2.5" LED puck will fit inside it. This light would be a little more complicated to fair into a fender, but it can be done. In automotive kustom applications, this lens is quite often set into a channel molded into the car's fender. This could also be done on a bike, providing the bottom of the added channel is above the actual fender. Below is shown a sketch of a built-up and sculpted fender fairing for the |
Jim Wilson: Building A Serious Lighting System For KustomBikes- Part Two: CYA - Functional Tail Lighting for KustomBikes |
Above and below: Motorcycle Tail lights from Vehicle Wiring Products at various prices. |
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Above and below: '39 Ford and '59 Cadillac Repro Tail Lights from JC Whitney |
There is an older style of truck marker light which consisted of a bullet-shaped plastic lens which was attached to a utilitarian lamp-housing. This type of setup can be adapted to bike use rather easily, but they aren't as common as they used to be. JC Whitney also has those auxiliary brake light strips, which would certainly serve well as bike tail-lights. The LED mini strip light, at $8.99 is ¾ X 4 ¾ ", so it would fit in pretty easily. The bigger one has two bulbs in it, is 1.5 X 6.5" and goes for $12.99. These would fit nicely into sculpted tail fins, especially combined with a Caddy Bullet lens. One can but dream. |
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Caddy Bullet lens. The base Bondo is applied to the actual fender, which is covered in mylar packing tape, so the finished piece can be removed from the fender. To make the recess, a section of 3.5" tubing is covered in mylar tape. The end of the tubing is stopped up with a cardboard disc and covered in |
mylar tape at the same time. The sides are halfway covered with a thin layer of bondo, and the end is totally covered. After the thin Bondo shell is set up hard, it is Bondo'd in place on the fender shell. After this union is cured, more Bondo is applied until the form is solid and the fore end is shaped to your satisfaction. The form may be dressed down quickly by using a belt sander. This technique may be used to sculpt a great many perfectly-fitted but removable forms. |
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Above and below from JC Whitney |
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Left: The ultimate use for a car tail-light is to recreate the car's actual form in a full- frame composite fairing. (From JimW' s SketchPad, which also gives a '59 Caddy suggestion.) |
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Above: The beauty of LEDs, in addition to their low current draw, is that they are compact and may be worked into small spaces. This example shows LED arrays worked into 1.5" chrome-plated brass tubing from the plumbing section of the hardware store. To the left is a set of curved drain tubes mated to a battery box made of plywood, to be covered in a composite skin. The box is designed to mount to the triangular space defined by a bicycle's seat stays and brake/fender bridge. The box shown has an inner volume of 7 X 4 X 4 ", large enough for a 12-amp-hour gel battery. The outside tubes could easily be made to serve as turn indicators. 10 MM ultra-bright LEDs are available at Radio Shack stores in Red, Yellow, and Orange. Prices for individual units range from $2.50-$3 each. Other sources offer lower prices, especially in quantities of 10 or more. LEDs are also available in Blue, which makes possible a revival of the "Blue Dot" tail-light in solid-state form. There are also LED retrofit clusters, which have a light bulb base attached. The retrofit unit fits an existing tail-light bulb socket, and allows replacement with a low-drain lighting element which lasts forever. |
Afterburner 02 tail light is nice-looking, has 2 hi-power LEDs "Photon Funnel" lens system $25 from Specialized |