Project light is complete

The light is now complete and installed on the bike with one test ride behind it. I was impressed with the performance, but it wasn't all smooth sailing. I had some serious switch problems, but appear to have overcome them for now.

First I tried one of these that was labelled as a sealed mini toggle switch. As you can see they appear to be rated at 250VAC 2A. I figured that 40VDC at 150 mA would be fine. It worked for a while, then right after I finished mounting everything on the bike for a test run the switch failed to on all the time, no matter what the position of the toggle. Then the action on the switch failed, it went all rubbery. I took it back to Jaycar, but by then the action had come good but the switch still always measured closed over one pair of terminals regardless of the position of the toggle.

I got another one and after only a couple of throws under load it developed the same problem. It was then that I noticed that what was printed on the side of the switch was “0.4 VA MAX” not "2A 250VAC” as pictured on the Jaycar site. I tried the convince the loser at Jaycar that the switch wasn’t what it purported to be, but no dice. He didn’t give me my money back. At that point I stopped giving a shit and just wanted a switch that would work.

So I grabbed 2 of these (or so I thought) I put the first one in and was going to try 10 cycles, but it failed in the same way after 5 cycles. I broke open the switch to see if it was fused closed, but it wasn’t. I also discovered how pathetically simple these switches are inside.

In looking at the second switch I had bought I found that it was SPDT, centre off, so I must have picked up one of these by mistake. I decided that maybe it was the frequency of cycling the switch that was causing the failures, so decided to put this one in and try 1 minute between cycles (i.e. 1 minute on, 1 minute off). I tried this 5 times with no failures and then left the light on for 10 minutes and off for 1 minute the back on again with no failures. So all is good for now.

We'll see what happens next week as a intend to ride as many days as weather permits. I will take some photos of the setup on the bike with some beam shots in my next post.