Commuting with My Schmidt Dynamo Hub

On the cold commute into the office this morning, a few solitary snow flakes fell as I climbed just below the snowline of Pusch Ridge.

My Schmidt Dynamo will serve me well on the long commute I believe I must now ride in to avoid traffic. It’s the Mt. Lemmon 200 Km Brevet course, which for the first 13 or so miles, takes me through some remote places. There’s still open desert out there, and I’ll ride through some older Tucson neighborhoods—dwellings that have blended into the landscape so things still feel like rural desert.

Thanksgiving Weekend will be cloudy with some rain. There will be snow on Mt. Lemmon!

How do I feel about the drag of the hub? I just know that the new ones have a lot less drag/no drag at all—that I’ve heard from a bunch of the fellows I met from out-of-town recently. My hub is older and there’s some weight—but I have to say that as I get going I don’t notice the drag that much.

What I will say is that it’s bright. Out in the open desert, and on the remote underdeveloped part of the bike path, it works great.

Busy traffic at about River Rd and Campbell Ave.


This gives you a bit of an idea of the beam of my Lumotec lamp. The beam goes out about 20 yards. Part of the beam falls a bit closer, and again closer to light the area around my wheel. The beam lights up an area about four to five feet wide.

I have a knob that I bought from Profile Design, that attaches to the fork, as you can see. The price I paid for that simple little attachment was a rip-off, but it works. The best thing I like about that knob is that I don’t have it so tight that I can’t adjust the beam as I ride. I can move the lamp up or down slightly depending on where I’m at. Also, if I hit a bump or something, there’s some give, and possibly the lamp won’t snap off.

I tried the lamp on my handle bars but it was too high—for me the fork works best. I have a white strobe/blinky light that I believe works best on the handle bars for visibility. As you know, the hub generated light dims as you slow. I want to have the blinky light such that no one turns left in front of me as I continue forward from a stop sign or stop light.

Here I'm about to jump off the bike path into traffic, and make my 3 mile climb to rendezvous with Little Egypt. The bike lane is at least eight feet wide, and the 3 miles of climbing is uninterrupted with no entrances for cars to pull in and out of.

Happy Thanksgiving, Gentle Reader!