Princeton Tec Fuel headlamp

Ever since my buddy Jon and I miscalculated how much daylight we had left on our bike ride and got caught riding at night without any lights on the bike trail, we've looked into various lighting equipment for night riding. Riding on the bike trail is way different than riding on a city street. At least on the streets you have the luxury of street lamps, cars or lights coming from windows to light your way, but on a bike trail it's like riding in the back country.

Jon first started off with two Cateye HL-EL220 LED's and once he saw how much my Blackburn X6 lights illuminated the trail he went looking for another lighting system. He finally bought a Light and Motion headlight that gave out 300 lumens, which cost him around $300.

I started off with two Blackburn Voyager 3.0 lights (17 lumens each) and then upgraded to Blackburn System X6. The X6 worked great with one spot light and one flood light. The only downside is that the battery is on it's last leg. It could only sustain 100% intensity until 45 minutes and then it would go down to 60% power. So I may be looking for another bike light soon.

The one thing that I was missing was that I couldn't see my cycling computer and since the lamps were positioned in front of the bike the areas behind was in need to be illuminated. I needed a helmet lamp to fill in that gap.

Enter the Princeton Tec Fuel headlamp. For around $25 you can get a small and compact little headlamp. It puts out 35 lumens and runs on 3 AAA batteries. The lamp is designed so that you do not get blinded by the light being projected from the LEDs. It didn't come with an attachment for a bike helmet, but I was able to cannibalize an old headlamp strap and attach it to my helmet with ease. If you don't have an old strap around, some velcro strips will work just fine. Being able to rotate the lamp up and down is a plus in aiming the light to a certain point ahead.

It has 4 settings, high, medium, low and blink. On high the lamp should last for about 74 hours, low 164 hours and blink 134 hours. The range of the beam is high (32-40 meters), medium (24-32 meters), low (16-24 meters) and blink (32-40 meters).

The only issue I might see is the plastic latch that holds the batteries. I just don't know how durable it is with constant use. There is a tab on the headband that is used for opening the latch. Don't try to open it with your fingers, unless you really have fingernails of steel.

In conclusion I love this little lamp. In an emergency it could be used alone as the main light on the bike trail.