The front light I'm sending you, currently lying on my desk as a reminder to find the spare bubs for it, is a BUMM Lumotec Oval Senso Plus* and has wiring permanently attached to the lamp at one end, and spades for a SON at the other end. You'll have to cut off the spades to use the lamp with the Shimano hub. Also on the lamp are two pairs of connectors for spades, one to provide juice to the rear light, the other set presumably to use with the dynamo hub if you don't want the fixed wire and cut it off. Or one may be to a second lamp, because this Lumotec Oval was the one that could be used in double hub dynamo setups, see Marten Gerritsen's M-Engineering site pages in The Netherlands.
The knob under the lamp slides to open it for changing the bulb. Be careful, the bulb is held in only by springloaded pressure.
Make sure you get a Shimano Hub Dynamo Connector with your dynamo wheel or you can run up unconscionable postage to get this one-quid piece of grey plastic. You screw the wires into the connector and then you plug the connector into the socket on the hub.
You don't need to get special cable to wire up lights. Any old zipcord will carry that little current. Special bicycle lamp "cable" -- special anything "cable", including crap sold as "audiophile" -- comes off the same roll as cheap wire called "wire". The stuff BUMM sells, and Peter White, is especailly nasty and cheap, except that it's overpriced because it comes from BUMM. Look around your kitchen cabinets and your garage and you'll find plenty of suitable wire you can cut off (don't cut it off your wife's hairdryer!), or your local electrical shop will cut you some off a roll of twin-core. Note that, twin-core: you need two wires, not one as in the usual cheap and nasty British installation which uses the bike frame for an uncertain return. It might have been worth buying the BUMM wiring kit if it were complete, but in their usual pennypinching style it is terminated only one end, so you have the same bother of finding bits, so you may as well pay a quarter as much for the same wire locally and cut out the waiting.
If you need to buy spade fittings for the rear lamp, take the lamp to your local motor factor and don't leave with anything in a sealed packet that he won't open to show you they fit. Those spades aren't one of the more common sizes...
*BUMM means it's a light for bikesnobs. Lumotec means it's halogen. Oval means it has a reflector built in. Senso means it is light sensitive and switches on and off automatically (this is the one lamp on which it is a useful facility, because the MTBF of the bulbs is only 100 hours, so you don't want to keep the light on during daylight hours -- I don't know if the 100 hours is a CYA or true, because I've never had a globe failure, though some of my bike lamps have done many times a 100 hours of service). Plus means it has a built-in current store and stays on for four minutes after your bike stope, a safety measure called a standlight, in my opinion an esssential facility, most reassuring.
Andre Jute
