[Closed] Anyone made their own battery lighting system before?

On the off-chance that this isn't a wind up I will have a go at answering:

Why bother when you can get these for £14
http://www.wiggle.co.uk/p/cycle/7/Smart_5_LED_Front_and_317_Rear_Light_Set/5360026000/

And don't listen to music whilst you are riding a bike or you will become a zombie.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6936280.ece

no wind up. i dont want to buy a light not for the money but for the reason that i like to make things myself if you know what i mean.
and dont worry its only for XC riding, never on the roads so its safe to listen to a bitta music, keeps us riding fast 🙂

I don't think a wind up light is a good starting point for an off road light. You want to be looking at something based on a high powered Cree or Seoul LED. Have a search for posts by trout or do a search on DX lights. Alternatively look on candlepower forums under bike lighting.

get a twelve volt lead acid batt, 20 watt, 12v MR11 halogen bulb, switch from maplins, mount lamp and switch in suitably sized deoderant can and hey presto! excellent light used every winter 4 3 years. only stopped using it when got a set of DX torches last year. Cheap as chips to.

get somat cheap for the bars to use on fire roads and i used to get about 2.5 hours out of it

If you're looking to run a 6v system, use cheap halogen bulbs from Reflectalite and fire them with a 7.2v battery. Here's one I made earlier:-

This auction is for a purpose-built set of lights based on the ever-popular 6-volt Smart twin halogen lights but with heavy-duty upgrades for serious power and long burn-times.

The lights themselves have been upgraded to 2 x 10w bulbs for off-road use. As well as this, the standard switch (occasionally unreliable, at best) has been replaced with two mini-toggle switches that are held in a small casing. This is attached to the unit with a simple stick-on pad to come away in the event of a crash. As can be seen, it comes with two spare reflectors and a complete spare casing. It also comes with 2 x 2.4w, 1 x 6w and 3 x 10w spare halogen bulbs.

I'm also including a Smart Owl 6w / 10w unit as a backup.

The battery packs are the key to a very bright lighting system. These lights usually come with a 4500mAh 6v lead-acid battery but this comes a 10,000mAh (yes, ten-thousand mAh) Ni-MH D-cell battery pack at 7.2volts that weighs about 980gm .... and there are two of these, so you can have one on charge all the time, as the intelligent charger has Delta-V technology!!

They do fit into the Smart carrying cases, as shown.

Over-volting halogen bulbs by 20% is something that Lumicycle have been doing successfully for years. Although it reduces bulb life to about 12% (from about 5000 hours to 600 hours), it also increases brightness to 180% !! No big deal, as these bulbs cost about £2 to £3 each and 600 hours for me is 150 night rides of 4 hours, so I haven't blown one yet 🙂

Also, running 6v bulbs at 7.2v actually gives a marginally 'whiter' light than when running these at 6v.

Read more here:-

http://www.myra-simon.com/myra/bike/lights.html

As expected, the standard Smart charger is not much good for a battery of this size, so this comes with an intelligent 7.2v Delta-V fan-cooled charger that takes about 4-5 hours to boost each battery to full power and then automatically trickle-charges it. If the battery pack is charged in front of a domestic fan, this slightly reduces the charge time - these do get hot when charging but just in case, I'm also including a spare pair of battery housings, still in their wrappers, as shown.

The clever bit is that whilst the standard Smart units offer short burn times, this gives about 3 hours .... at full power!!

Make no mistake!! These are F-A-R brighter and last F-A-R longer than the popular standard Smart twin halogen units and even give the expensive HID / LED brand-name lights a good run for their money with a more 'three-dimensional' light than the flat white beam of LED and HID units costing well into the £100's