This box contains 100 miniature rubber bike lights, which I ordered directly from a manufacturer
in China.
In this quantity they’re cheap as balls.
Literally, I think they cost as much as ping pong balls.
Anyway these lights are great for being seen when riding around town but they’re pretty
useless for lighting up your path.
Each light has 3 settings; constant on, strobe, and slow blink.
They’re sometimes known as safety lights, but I prefer the colloquial “blinky”.
So you may be thinking, dude why did you buy all these blinkies?
Well it’s in direct response to a comment on the bike lights video.
I had joked that for the price of one hight end bike light you could buy 10 cheapo lights
off Amazon and put them all on your handlebars.
You guys want to see that, but I don’t.
Riding around with 64,000 milliamps worth of the cheapest lithium ion batteries you
can legally buy would be sketchy at best.
So, I’ve opted for 100 of these harmless blinkies instead.
The Fat Ripper is the perfect bike for this experiment because of the skinny steel tubing,
rigid fork, and BMX handlebars.
We should be able to fit all 100 blinkies on the front.
Almost immediately I started finding some duds.
This was unsurprising.
Still 90 something lights would be no joke, so I weeded out the bad ones and pressed on,
methodically.
Not a single nook or cranny was spared.
Afterwards I took a closer look at the duds and found that they were ALL easy to repair.
By replacing the batteries or playing around with the contacts, all 100 blinkies were working.
I even found spots for them.
Now to wait for nightfall.
Turning all the blinkies on took a few minutes, and I even found that one of them was red.
The question on everyone’s mind though is whether the combined might of 100 blinkies
is enough to illuminate a path.
The answer is, sort of.
Clearly there was light being projected, randomly from the front of the bike.
I did my best to point the blinkies towards the ground, but it’s only possible to do
so much.
One thing’s for sure; everyone could see me.
Fun blinky fact.
There are 2 CR3032 batteries per blinky—you know those flat batteries that cost $7 a pair
at the drugstore.
At that price it costs wayyy less to just replace your whole blinky when the batteries
go dead.
That’s ridiculous.
Of course, buying your 2032’s in bulk would help.
Still, it’s amazing how long the batteries last on these.
You can expect to get a few weeks worth of commuting out of one blinky before it goes
dead.
That reminds me, there’s a reason we call these blinkies.
As I rode around town, causing seizures and scaring puppies, I realized that I’ve done
much more ridiculous things to
a fat bike.
So there you have it, 100 blinkies.
I know it’s not the 10 amazon lights you guys really wanted to see, but at least these
can’t explode 4 inches from my scrotum.
As a very wise man once said, safety is number one priority.
Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this and if you see me at Miami Critical Mass this Friday
I’ll give you one of these blinkies.
Thanks for riding with me today, and I’ll see you next time.