Dynamo Lighting Set Installation...

hate to tell you, but without a voltage regulator, you will burn those lights out in a very short amount of time. bicycle generators arent made for the constant speeds that engines produce. the generator will turn too fast, overloading the lights and burning them out. there is a store on ebay called wonderful creations that sells different lighting equipment for motorized bicycles. i bought a headlight from them its a 6v headlight, $17 plus 5 for shipping, 2 super bright led's, 270 lumen, built-in voltage regulator, sealed unit for weather resistance, can be run off the lighting coil they sell, a battery, or the white wire. i run it off my white wire. its much brighter than a bullet light anyhow. those bullet lights are not very bright at all.

Radio shack sells a 5 volt regulater for 1.99 that you can attach to some heat-sinking metal and then put that somewhere. It will also act as a half-rectifier for the AC that the dynamos put out.

Cree XR and lux LED's can handle a direct line to the dynamo if they are attached to the star-heatsink. Bright as all-get-out too.

My set up consists of two Cree LED's in parallel directly wired to the dyno, and then a handful of Radio Shack High-output LED's that are driven by the 5-volt regulator and coupled with a 100 ohm or more resister(color dependant).

The AC is split. One pulse is oriented to the two Cree's for MEGA blast, and the other pulse is oriented to the regulator and smaller capacity LED's for speedo, and running lights. The crees do pulse quite dramatically under 10mph. Higher than that and you cannot tell its only half of the dyno's wave.

I cruise between 30 and 40 MPH for long periods and the Crees have held up so far, going on almost three-thousand miles. I've used both 12V and 6V dyno's with the same lighting.

It works. Step up to some Cree LED's, replace the bulbs in your unit with them, and regulate the rear/runner lights. I uses the Cree's out of some cheap Head-lamps. Look for the single LED lamps that take 3, 1.5 volt batteries. Typically they are cree and will have matching optics. The pair of lights can be seen in the pic within this thread, if interested. Cree LED's with optics will fit PERFECT within a Radio shake small project box as seen here http://motorbicycling.com/showthread.php?t=41622.

bigbutterbean said:

hate to tell you, but without a voltage regulator, you will burn those lights out in a very short amount of time. bicycle generators arent made for the constant speeds that engines produce. the generator will turn too fast, overloading the lights and burning them out. there is a store on ebay called wonderful creations that sells different lighting equipment for motorized bicycles. i bought a headlight from them its a 6v headlight, $17 plus 5 for shipping, 2 super bright led's, 270 lumen, built-in voltage regulator, sealed unit for weather resistance, can be run off the lighting coil they sell, a battery, or the white wire. i run it off my white wire. its much brighter than a bullet light anyhow. those bullet nice led lights are not very bright at all.

Click to expand...

LED lights seems to be way ahead of other old lights in terms of brightness.