Velo lighting system (turn signals)

Hi all,

I'm in the process of building a velo shell for my trike, to hopefully allow me to ride more during our lovely Vermont winters. Right now the trike is partially fared and I've been using generic bike headlights and tail lights, which have worked well enough. The days are getting shorter though and I'm going to try to continue commuting to work, and I find myself thinking turn signals would be a wise safety feature.

I'm pretty handy with a soldering iron, but I have no formal education in electronics. Everything I know is from tinkering and cobbling together. I can think of a few ways I might do this, but I'm interested in one that's going to be cost effective and efficient.

Ideally I'd have a single battery (12v? 5v?) powering them all, with wires running to each light, maybe a bank of switches and a volt meter so I know how much charge I have left. It wouldn't be hard to pick up some cheap housings for the lights and use generic T10/194 LEDs all around, but I'm unsure what kind of relay to use to get blinkers for the turn signals. A bit of googling suggests that relays can often use more power than the devices connected to them. Anyone have any experience with this? Maybe some specific part recommendations?

Also, any suggestions on how to protect chain and such from salt/sand/slush? How about snow tire recommendations? I've seen some suggest using zip ties as poor-man's "studs". I haven't found much available in 20" other cheap children's mountain bike knobies.

The best single thread about lights/signals is Teklektik's, which you can find looking thru topics he's started. All the info for parts and wiring is there.

If you don't mind cobbling up from used bits you can go to my SB Cruiser thread and see what I've done over the last couple years, but there's no explicit wiring diagram or parts list there, just pics and descriptions amongst the various posts.


Regarding "winterizing", there are a number of threads about that, if you look up titles with winter* or cold* or snow* in the titles. (make sure to use the * there, so it finds spelling variations, and display by topic/thread).