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The Gray Man Visits the Bike Shop
Jul. 13th, 2020 09:14 pmA few days ago, I made the rounds of several bike shops. I'd found what I wanted online but thought I'd spend my money where it would help locally.
What I was looking for was a 12v/6v "bottle" generator, the kind that when you pull the lever it rests a little drive wheel against the side of your bike tire and generates electricity to power your lights while you're riding.
It's an old concept first used, I think, by the Brits after WWI. The newest iteration of this idea is a dynamo that's built into the front wheel hub, the advantage being that wet, snowy, muddy road conditions won't interfere with contact between the driven wheel of the generator and the tire of the bike.
One disadvantage is that, with a hub drive, you're always working against that resistance whether you're using your lights or not.
The other disadvantage is, like I told the guy in one shop that I visited, that getting a wheel built with a generator hub would make that one wheel worth more than my entire bike, lol.
Interestingly, in Europe and Asia, many bikes come equipped with hub generators right from the factory. Which makes them a lot more common and at least somewhat cheaper.
And that is because, while bikes are mostly used for daytime recreation here, they're more frequently used for commuting and transportation of goods and passengers elsewhere. That's what I've read, anyway.
But aside from cost, I'd still rather have the bottle type for simplicity and serviceability. Much like my preference for rim brakes rather than the more expensive and more difficult to service rotor brakes--which are apparently the rage now.
Anyway, as I was leaving the shop--the third one where I'd been told that they just didn't carry the old-style generators anymore--the young man apologized that all they had was those lights which you simply plug in to recharge at home.
So I turned to him and said, yeah, I know it's a whole different mindset, but what if there were no place to plug in your light at the end of the day?
I'm sure he thought I was talking about being on a weekend camping trip, maybe to go mountain biking.
But I wasn't. And being The Gray Man, I didn't tell him any different...
LPK
Dreamwidth
7.13.2020
What I was looking for was a 12v/6v "bottle" generator, the kind that when you pull the lever it rests a little drive wheel against the side of your bike tire and generates electricity to power your lights while you're riding.
It's an old concept first used, I think, by the Brits after WWI. The newest iteration of this idea is a dynamo that's built into the front wheel hub, the advantage being that wet, snowy, muddy road conditions won't interfere with contact between the driven wheel of the generator and the tire of the bike.
One disadvantage is that, with a hub drive, you're always working against that resistance whether you're using your lights or not.
The other disadvantage is, like I told the guy in one shop that I visited, that getting a wheel built with a generator hub would make that one wheel worth more than my entire bike, lol.
Interestingly, in Europe and Asia, many bikes come equipped with hub generators right from the factory. Which makes them a lot more common and at least somewhat cheaper.
And that is because, while bikes are mostly used for daytime recreation here, they're more frequently used for commuting and transportation of goods and passengers elsewhere. That's what I've read, anyway.
But aside from cost, I'd still rather have the bottle type for simplicity and serviceability. Much like my preference for rim brakes rather than the more expensive and more difficult to service rotor brakes--which are apparently the rage now.
Anyway, as I was leaving the shop--the third one where I'd been told that they just didn't carry the old-style generators anymore--the young man apologized that all they had was those lights which you simply plug in to recharge at home.
So I turned to him and said, yeah, I know it's a whole different mindset, but what if there were no place to plug in your light at the end of the day?
I'm sure he thought I was talking about being on a weekend camping trip, maybe to go mountain biking.
But I wasn't. And being The Gray Man, I didn't tell him any different...
LPK
Dreamwidth
7.13.2020
