Cycling UK Forum

Page 8 of recent"cycle" refers to a dynamo that charges a variety of gear. It gives a webpage of jkonglobal.com but this page cannot be found. Does anyone know correct address? CJ perhaps?

its an 'i' not a'j'. www.ikonglobal.com

thanks for the address. The pictures suggest a fairly basic cheap bottle dynamo. Has anyone tried it? Does it work?

Although it comes with a dynamo there's nothing that special about the dynamo: the crux of this piece of kit is a transformer thingy that converts the normal AC output (all cycle "dynamos" are really alternators) into something like 12V DC which it supplies to a car-type fag-lighter socket. (So you also need the car charger lead for your phone, to transform that back down into whatever voltage suits your phone.)

I didn't fancy the cheap, nasty, noisy and inefficient "dynamo" it came with, so I tested this device with a Nordlicht bottle and a Schmidt hub. They would both charge okay, but only if I connected the lead when the bike was already moving. In normal stop-start riding the device would drop out of charge mode and not pick up again when the bike gradually speeded up. Sometimes I could jerk it back into charge by sprinting away from a stop, but that wasn't very practical. It seems that these more efficient alternators go into a low voltage mode unless presented with a sufficiently high resistance.

Thats a shame, since the only sort of "dynamo" I reckon most people would want to run in daylight, just to charge up a phone, is a Schmidt or at least a Shimano hub. Partly because of that and partly becasue I still couldn't be sure what was going on here, I never got around to writing it up for the CTC mag.