Another block o’ wood (and some other stuff)

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 09:43pm

Last week I broke the clip on the rear light on my bike. The fortunate aspect of this is that I was forced to mount the Cateye TL-LD1000 I picked up a few months ago.

I had been procrastinating over mounting this light as the obvious solution using the belt clip to attach the light to the loop on the back of my seat bag (where the old light was) has a crucial flaw. It was too easy to detach the light from the clip and I doubted if it could survive even a single trip to or from work. Another issue was that the light then angled downwards at a 45° angle which isn’t very good for visibility. The old light was much smaller and only angled down by a few degrees.

At first I was considering an elaborate bracket to attach the light to the back of the seat bag but by necessity I ended up with a much simpler solution that used a screw, a cable tie, and a roughly shaped block bit of wood:

As well as the belt clip and a post mount the light can be mounted on a rack via some holes on the back of the light. In the drawer of miscellaneous bits I found a screw of the right size that was short enough, had a coarse enought thread to self tap into plastic, and had a domed head. The hole that resulted from breaking the tab off the belt clip was in the correct location to drive this screw into one of the mounting holes to securely attach the clip to the light.

After I slipped it through the loop on the back of the bag it was a simple matter to shape a small scrap of wood that both fitted in the gap on the back of the belt loop and lifted the light enough to be parallel with the road when secured with a cable tie.

This isn’t as elegant as my previous block o’ wood solution but it has been doing the job. If I find the time (unlikely) I may replace the bit of wood with a better shaped piece of plastic.

The even more obvious solution for mounting the light would have been on the seat post where the reflector currently is. This has two issues: first that it is then obscured by my legs and the bag, and second is that the road rules for cyclists state that a rear light AND rear reflector are required…

Tagged with: cycling