Switch oveR

About 8 years ago, I organised one of the Welsh XC Rounds near to Brecon. After the race, while walking the course to retrieve the race signage, I found a short piece of carbon bar with a partially mangled bar-end attached to it, presumably where some unfortunate racer had collided with a tree. In much you same way as you find odd shoes around the countryside, you’d think one bar-end wouldn’t be useful to anyone, but I picked it up anyway and took it home where it lay in the bottom of my “bits and pieces” box ever since.

Back to the present day, I’ve been thinking for a while about how to charge electronic devices while on long bikepacking trips. Having acquired both a dynamo hub and an Exposure Revo, I’ve been happily enjoying not having to charge my light batteries all winter. But, during the day when you don’t necessarily need your lights off road, you could be putting all the energy generated by your hub into something else, like a buffer battery or, via a Cycle2Charge, direct into a GPS/Spot/Phone.

Inspired by a switch arrangement that I saw on Bear Bones Bikepacking, I thought I’d like to make myself one. I contacted Drew and asked where he got some of his components from and while hunting for on-off-on switches, managed to find a switch with a diameter of approximately 20 mm. Now all I needed was to find something with an internal diameter of 20 mm:

The bar-end needed two exit slots; one for the cable that would go to the Revo and the other for the cable that would go to my Cycle2Charge:

On the opposite side, I drilled a 9 mm hole that would take a female connector, into which the feed from the hub would be plugged:

The female connector was assembled and a short piece of platypus hose cut, into which the connector would later be inserted to insulate it against the bar-end:

The finished wiring arrangement, following a bit of guidance from Drew (thanks buddy!), as electronics wasn’t really my strong point at school:

All that was left was to shoe-horn this little arrangement into my bar-end. The short piece of hose fitted into the 9 mm hole very snugly, and with a bit of warming with a hair drier, the female connector could be pushed in fairly easily. When cool, everything is held in place firmly:

And here it is fitted to the bike:

Switching between the Revo and my Cycle2Charge (which will reside very happily in my Wildcat Gear Tom Cat, along with the devices being charged), is as easy as flicking a switch:

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to comment 🙂