BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
The Fireball system was designed by MTBer Andrew Edwards, who works for his family’s sheet metalwork company Osborne-Brown Precision Sheet Metalwork Ltd of Mirfield, West Yorkshire.
Osborne-Brown is making the CNCed aluminium lamps, available in silver, blue, black or red.
The bike trade connection is provided by roadie Dave Sowerby of Sowerby Brothers, the Mirfield IBD.
Sowerby and Edwards formed Pinnacle Adventure Equipment Ltd. to market the Fireball lighting system to IBDs. The standard set (1x20w and 1x 35w lamps with bottle cage or bag mounted battery and fast-charger) costs £214.99 at retail, with a trade price of £118.98 ex vat, a margin of 35 percent. A colour flyer will be mailed to IBDs later this week, offering early bird orderers a five percent introductory discount.
Prototype Fireball systems were used by the Scott/MBUK MTB team at the recent Saab/Salomon 24-hour MTB race at Sandwell Park in the West Midlands.
Product will be shipped in mid-August. A URL for a website has been secured – www.powerlights.co.uk – but is not yet pointing to anything other than a hosting page.
The system’s main USP, apart from the ‘made-in-Britain’ tagline, is its flexibility. Riders can fine-tune their lighting preferences with the optional extras, such as extra cells for the bottle-cage battery (Pinnacle calls this the ‘DoubleLife Extender’, to retail for £69.99) and bulbsets with halogen bulbs at different wattages for different riding conditions (£19 for five bulbs).
The standard system is built around a 13.2 volt, 4amp-hours nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery pack. Standard bulbs are 10, 20 and 35 watts, each with 4000 hour run times. The Fireball’s electronics boost these wattages up to 12, 24 and 42.5 watt equivalents.
Running two 35 watt bulbs will eat the battery in about half an hour. Running with two 20 watt bulbs will eat the battery in an hour or so. For commuting use, riders can easily switch to 5 or 10 watt bulbs for increased battery life.
Later systems will have dimmer switches. A helmet mounting lamp is also being worked on.
Tel: 01924 499333
Email: info@powerlights.co.uk
