Lights: Part 2

From Bike Pics

My second light was pretty neat; it was a Blackburn Flea headlight. This little bugger put out 40 lumens and was about the size of a dollar coin. It has four LEDs on it and alternated between low, high and flashing modes, just like the Serfas light did. The really cool bit was that it was an entirely enclosed light. The battery inside it was charged via two little metal contacts on the bottom of it. You attached this little set of magnetic lead wires to a 1.5v battery. These wires were attached to a device that matched-up to the contacts on the Flea. Cute little system and lots of oohing and aahing about how cool it is. Accept And deservedly so.

From Bike Pics

Accept when the battery dies while you're on your bike. See, that cute little system is the only way to charge the light. So there are no batteries to replace if it dies while your on your way home. In the dark.

Another annoying thing about the Flea light was it's demo mode. The light is meant to be tested in the store. You can see how bright it is and wonder how something that small can put out that much light. Accept that I could never tell when it was in Demo mode and when it wasn't, unless I was riding. In demo mode, the light turns off after ten minutes. To get it out of demo mode, you hold the button down until the light turns off. The manual said something like twenty seconds, but it always seemed to go off after 12 or 13 seconds for me.

And then I would ride with it and halfway to work it would stop flashing. So I'd turn it on again and a few minutes later it would stop slashing. Again. This happened to me a few times; I finally figured out that it was doing this because it wasn't charged enough. Which brings me to another point.

It really didn't seem to like charging from rechargeable batteries. Most NiMH batteries are actually 1.2 volts rather than the 1.5 volts of normal alkaline batteries. So I tried using some AA and AAAs. When you are charging the Flea, the LEDs on the light flash intermittently to indicate that id t is charging. Cool. But sometimes it never seemed to FINISH charging. Which means that the battery you were using to charge it didn't have enough charge to bring the battery in the Flea to a full charge.

So I switched to D and C size batteries and things seemed to get better. If I forgot to charge it for a week, the light would die mid ride. When it did this you could turn it back on and it would run for a little while then drop to low power mode and then finally turn off. Again, no way to charge it mid-ride.

The flea used a velcro strap to mount to the handle bars. This was pretty simple and seemed to work ok, but after a few months I noticed that the sides of the strap here starting to tear. This was probably due to my repositioning the light after it was strapped down tight. But I lived with it, up until a few weeks ago when I lost the light.

I hadn't mounted it to the handle bars as I was making a couple of stops on my way home one afternoon. So I left the light in the bottle holder of my trunk bag. Somewhere along the way, it must have bounced out, cause I haven't seen it since...

So, once again I was on the lookout for a light to commute by...