I love this little bike. It does everything. It's better than my A-Line in that it can carry stuff - lots of stuff. One way it carries stuff is so well is I have a mount point at the center of the handlebars where I can attach my back pack (somehow I don't have pix of this - I'll take some next chance I get). It's a pretty great setup - but it limits what I can do for road illumination lights. Last year I mounted a pair of magicshine lamps at the ends of the handlebars, which had some pros and cons:
Pros:
* The lights were not blocked by the back pack
* The lights were spaced very wide - oncoming cars could have a sense of depth, rather than a blinky point in space.
* Separated lights helps better illuminate the road.
Cons:
* I don't have a lot of room on the handlebars. It was hard to keep the lamps in place
* The damn wire! I hate having the wire run past my hand on the grips.
So, I devised a solution. It comes in two parts: First, I mount the lights at the very end of the handlebars using a scheme similar to how bar end shifters are mounted. There's a plug that expands when a center bolt is tightened. This gives a secure mount to the light. Second, I run power to the ends of the handlebars
under the throttle and handgrip using copper tape.
Here are the pix:
I have one light installed already on the left. I'm hoping to cook up something better for the right side, then upgrade the left. It works well for now, but I think I can do better. Pictured: the magicshine lantern, a short power cord (with JST connector), held in place via the quick release you see. The quick release compresses a rubber plug that expands in the handlebar. The glossy bit you see outboard of the grip is some epoxy covering where I have the wire soldered to copper tape.
Here it is pulled out a bit. These things come off easy, in a few seconds. Just release the quick connect, and unplug the JST
Here's the entire arrangement fully detached, ready to stow in the bag.
So, how exactly does it get power? I'll show pix of the right side being installed. Here's the "before" pic. Power will run beneath the grip, the throttle, the brake mount and the ringy-ding-ding bell.
Step one: Take everything off:
Next, wipe down the handlebars with a good cleaner - I used acetone - to make a good surface for tape to stick. Next, lay down a strip of Kapton tape. It's an electric insulator. The copper tape will conduct through its adhesive, and the paint on the handlebar is not going to work as an insulator - so first I lay a base of kapton tape. Make sure the base layer of tape is longer and wider than the two runs of copper tape. The tape I have is about 20mm wide. Good enough.
Try to lay it straight, and try to work out all folds and bubbles. I ran the wire past a small bend, it's hard to have perfectly flat tape with the bends
For the right side, I'm going to try to have less wire at the end, and no connector. I hope to interface the light module to the power source by having two copper pads on the expanding plug. All I need to do then is line up the pads with copper traces that are on the
inside of the tube, and expand the plug. This is the improvement I referred to earlier.
To do so, I'll need to have my copper tape run along the outside of the handlebar, over the lip on the end, and a short ways into the tube. The base layer of kapton goes into the bar end about an inch:
Here is a pic after I installed the copper tape. The copper tape is about 6mm wide. As I placed it, I made certain there was a gap between the two copper lines, and that the copper tape didn't stray past the outer edge of the kapton.
Very hard to see here, but I had the copper tape wrap around the lip at the end of the steer tube and into the tube about 3/4"
With the copper tape in place, time for the all important continuity tests. Be sure to test continuity between each strip and some bare metal on the handlebar as well as continuity between the strips (we want no continuity of course).
Here are the wires near the handlebar post. Look carefully and you can see the base layer, the copper strips, then the top layer.
As thin as these three layers are, they do add enough to the handlebar diameter that putting things back on can be tricky. I don't want to scratch the delicate kapton and end up with a short. So, here you see me take the binding ring out of the throttle.
I pried the ring/clamp open a bit and stuck an allen wrench in the gap to keep it open just a little. Enough so the ring/clamp slid on the handlebar without scraping the kapton.
The next two shots show how the throttle just slides back together once the ring/clamp is in place. The clamp bolt holds it all together.
I used a similar trick to get the hand grip into place. I have the hand grip hang over the bar end by a couple millimeters to protect the copper and kapton if I fall.
The brake and the ring-ding-ding bell both have more tolerance for a wider radius. So, I spiraled some electrical tape over the wires to give it more protection (and stealth)
Here's a blurry pic of the handlebar with all the original parts in place. You can hardly tell the difference between this and the "before" picture.
Next, I prepared the wire. I just use the original connector from the magic shine. See I've cut it to length here.
Hard to see in this light, but here I'm prepping the inner end of the copper tape run to solder to the magicshine wire. One of the copper pads is tinned up, the other will be soon...
Wiring done. That was easy. All this e-bike work is teaching me how to solder.
Finally, I looped the wire fully around the handlebar (for strain relief) then wrapped a couple coats of electrical tape around the wire and solder pads to make it weather and damage resistant. I already own a nice "Y" connector for these magicshine wires. And the battery that runs the lights fits nice and snug in the side pouch of my center mounted back pack (I just use a 4s LiPo hard case battery).
Hopefully I can get the right side light finished and working as planned (physical mount that doubles as electrical interface). That'll be a few days, but it's nice to now have the wiring installed.
Let's see... in the last month: plugging a CA-DP into a Hall connector and frying the Halls, having the wrong controller show up since I asked for a rush, then finding out that Lyen sensorless controllers won't play nice with many geared hubbies, also accidentally killing one of Methods' detector board and almost draining a LiPo cell down to nothing.
