Introduction: A New Light for a New Bike

About: Hi, my name is John. My hobby is to solve problems from other people and creating nice and functional stuff out of trash. I'm living in Germany so excuse my not so fluent English (some technical terms are hard…

My Electric scooter is gone and I was forced to substitute it somehow. Back in my early days I was biking every day with my downhill so I bought myself a MTB with electric support... Of course it's no downhill but good enough for my daily journey to work and back...

Back to the Bike. Of course there is no light on these ~4000€ bikes due to the additional weight ;-) But for my drives I need light. Therefore I had several possibilities:

- Buy a battery snap on light

- Buy a special light for e-bikes (the main battery is used)

- Use a "old" headlight

- F*§k it and go later to work


All of the options have their pro and cons, for everything I have to buy I'll have the problem to spend a lot of money... and to go to work later is no option. Of course I've created something to use a "old" headlamp which my brother lost and found 1year later in his jacket...

Step 1: Where to Put It and How to Do It

Fist decision was done. Second one right ahead. Where should the light be mounted? There are several possibilities again. To shorten this I've put the light on the headset where the stem is also mounted. This way the light is directly in the middle of the handlebar which is quite nice for orientation. Also this way it is much easier to create the added parts due to the symmetry of the construct.

To enable everybody to play around, the freeCAD file but also the finished STL-files are added here.

Step 2: Installation on the Bike

I've planed all the Parts in a way that I'm able to hack everything together. This in mind I've used the screws I had in my workshop. These are not beautiful but used them now for more than 1000Km and they are doing OK.

To change the Battery I have to tilt my bike but it is not that annoying.

Step 3: Backlight

For the backlight it was not hard to find a solution at all... I've "upgraded" an old backlight which is mounted on my backpack. It is no longer water tight but good enough for my use case.

PS. Yes the Pictures where taken in my bathtub it's the only place in our house where I'm allowed to put my bike stuff at I guess it's because of the dirt but I'm not sure.

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