20 February, 2015

New Tail Light Brackets

by Scott

I'm a bit of a light nerd. There I said it and I feel better. I'm always looking at new lights, ways to attach lights and such and this brought me to our newest product - the E3 tail light bracket.
These are made in Portland, OR, laser cut from 5052 aluminum and then anodized black. Don't panic, silver is in the works. We have two models, a large one that mounts behind a caliper brake, and a smaller one that mounts on our rear racks as well as anywhere that has a threaded braze-on (think seatstays and dropouts).

Both models are designed to work with the super popular E3 taillight using a clever notch. This allows the light to be adjusted and repositioned after installation without having to re-wire your whole dynamo system.
The large bracket works off a seat stay bridge behind the caliper (6mm hole) if you have no rear rack. This would be a good choice if you are running a saddle bag, but want to have a secure mounting point up high for your tail light.

We should call this the Roberto.


In addition to accepting the E3 tail light, they're also compatible with light mounts that use a 50mm center to center spacing for those who wish to forego dynamo setups.

Priced at $15.50 for the large and $12.50 for the smaller one. Weights are 28g and 12g. Large measures 15cm long x 6cm wide, small measures 4cm long x 6cm wide. Both mounts use 4mm holes for light attachment.

8 comments:

Tyler said...

How far forward / high up does the "large" place the light mount relative to the mounting bolt? The specs say it's "15cm long" but I presume that's the length of the bracket.

I'm hoping to get a rough estimate of where this would end up on my frame as I tend to run somewhat large saddlebags.

Bill said...

Can those tail lights run hooked up to a battery?

Anonymous said...

Scott, This is great. The E3 Pro is the best taillight around, yet mounting it on anything other than a Euro rear rack takes some creativity. I've built several mounts for this light, and the current one is very similar to what you've designed. This solves one major caveat of mounting a tailight on a modern bikepacking rig.

Peter Robbins said...

You guys are on the right track! Now if only you could make a mount for my E3 tail light and Tubus Logo rack, I would snatch it up in a second. Here's what the light mount looks like. The distance between the mounting holes is perfect for the light but there's no hole for the light's wire and the bridge is too narrow to drill. I've seen some folks use spacers but it doesn't look great to me and appears to bend the wire too much.

Unknown said...

Roberto! I lol'ed.

antimony said...

Like Tyler, I'd love to see some more details and maybe in-situ pictures of the large. My saddlebags are small but my distance between tire and saddle is small due to short-me, and I'm not sure it would end up in the right place. (The small would definitely work, but I like the large better if it would.)

VeloOrange said...

It sits around 9 cm above the brake bridge

antimony said...

I still think some pictures would help -- I went ahead and ordered a large, and the problem was exactly what I feared -- it puts the light right where a seatpost mount would, way behind where my saddlebag sits.

And I don't think I can bend aluminum that thick -- it needs much steeper angles for my bike. Plus, bending it would weaken it substantially, which is why I never tried to hand-make a bracket like that -- anything I could bend would vibrate itself to death.