I ride with a young lad who is bike mad. His mum has v little money so i take him out to trail centres etc.
He has just been hive a box full of Light and Motion lights and chargers. He was delighted until he found that all 3 of the battery packs are dead. The chargers dont recognise them or state error. The lamp units seem to be old HID units and arent led.
Can i re-cell the battery packs? Is there some electronics in the battery pack to make the 'arc' lamps work? Can they be fixed?
I dont want to have to spend too much when i could find some LED units for not too much.
So, does anyone have any experience of these items? Are they destined for landfill or is refurb possible?
Thanks
Ian
MTB-batteries would be able to provide a suitable battery (and charger)...
the L&M HID lights were great back in the day but I seem to recall the bulbs were fragile and super expensive.
L&M lights are brilliant, super high quality.
Try and get the batteries re-celled if you can, maybe reach out to L&M in the states, they make their battery packs in house so they may be able to re-cell them for you.
I have a set of Lumicycles that I converted to LED ages ago when it was all the rage.
They are not bright by today's standards, but back in the day were something of a revelation.
Each lamp had 3 Cree XPG LEDs, but one of the LEDs has failed in one of them; so one lamp has 2, while the other still has 3.
I bought a replacement battery from MTB-Batteries a while back which is bottle mounted. You could probably take that out & squeeze it into some type of frame bag, but I have never been that way inclined as to do it I'd need to cut the lid of the bottle to get the wire out so it's a bit of a one-time operation.
Reliability - they were fine when I last used them. BUT, I have no idea what sort of battery life you would get out of them now. It used to be something stupid like 8 hours on high, but that's probably dropped quite a bit now as the battery has been sat for a long time not doing much.
They run hot when you are standing still and there is no thermal management. You need to keep air moving over them, but they've done the 24/12 in July without issue so they are fine in warmer weather so long as you are moving.
If you stop & don't turn them off I suspect they would be toast in minutes.
Anyway - if you want them, I am happy to post them for him to use. I keep hanging onto them for sentimental reasons, but realistically they are never going to get used. I have the original charger too.
I can stick them on charge & do some kind of rudimentary run time test before sending, just in case the battery is toast.
Let me know. No problem if they are not really what you are after.
They look like something from a bygone era, but if I test them & battery life is OK then they might get him underway.
