Light powered by engine

The white wire is not very useful.. it should either be taped off or removed completely.. The little magneto's these engines pack just don't have the ability to support anything off the white wire and feed enough power to the ignition, despite the claims.

I have a 3 AAA cell LED flashlight grounded to the frame and (+) wired to the white. While idling, the light is dim & flickering, but definitely visible. As I accelerate, the light gets brighter with the engine speed and seems to get as bright as it ever did with batteries.

Simple to do, but I don't know that I would ever wire a lesser powered light to it - LED is perfect because it's polarized and doesn't allow harmful polarity to pass. I attempted to connect an identical LED flashlight as a tail-light, but it caused neither light to function, so I guess they must have grounded one another out or reduced voltage to not function - the engine never missed a lick, either way.

if you wanted, you can get a single component cree HID led from superbrightleds.com and build one with advanced electrical knowledge. the problem is that the voltage can be anything in a reasonable range (2.5 - 36v) what matters is current, for leds its mA. these leds require at least 300mA and to provide awesome light, up to 800mA in some cases. this causes problems with the spark, killing the motor also.

i spent 80 bucks and bought a sturmey archer xl-fdd. its a 6v 3w dynamo built into the front hub. some people make quality lights for dynamos at a steep price, im building my own power station to charge a cell phone, my lights and a sla battery. not at the same time of course...

in all, if you just want to ride without worrying about battery charging... just go with a 30 dollar solar trickle charger. its 12v giving a larger range of lighting choice, its cheap, and its hands free. best of all, you get to keep 25% of your engines power.