I bought a Planet Bike 3-LED blinky rear light for my TriCross.

My first attempt to fit it to the bike met with failure. I clipped it onto the loop specially designed for that purpose on my Specialized tail bag. It turns out the nylon the loops is made of is way too thin. The first big bump I hit, it fell off and broke into a million pieces. OK, not a million, more like five. The lens is cracked at the top a bit, but it still went back together and still works.

After that, I used one of the included brackets to mount it to the left seatstay. This worked OK, but it was not as visible as the one on my Simple City, which was neatly mounted with a special bracket just below the rack. It would also not be acceptable after I mounted the rack, which would have obstructed it. Turns out the one on my Simple City is a special bracket, which costs an additional $4 and would require me to order it or drive 30 miles one way to buy it "locally."

Some suggested rigging the clip closed in different ways and clip it to the seat bag loop.

I just put a Topeak rack on this bike, and the bag that goes on the rack would block the light, even if we forget for a moment that there's no room for both that bag and the Topeak one.

The Topeak rack came with a couple of light mounts. One for their Topeak lights, which are of course sold separately and use button batteries. One huge one for huge, old-fashioned 1960 reflectors. The Topeak one is made for clip-on style lights. My Planet Bike light has a clip, but it didn't fit exactly right.

I had almost resigned myself to make the special trip to buy one from the shop 30 miles away. But they are not bike-friendly roads that go from Round Lake to Zion, IL. Plus, it would be a longer ride than I'm up for at this point. Driving and burning 2 gallons of gas was out of the question.

The more I thought about it, the more it ticked me off. So I decided to clip the light on the smaller mounting tab and use epoxy putty to ensure it wouldn't pop off. I decided that the light is already damaged, and I wasn't going to buy a special Topeak light, so I had nothing to lose except time.

In short, it worked like a charm:




An added bonus is that since it is glued onto the clip thing, I don't have to worry about remembering to take it off when I lock the bike up somewhere. No one else can take it unless they brought a stubby phillips and have a lot of patience.

I guess the main point of this post is that if you have something that almost works, you can probably make it work with epoxy putty. I got a two-tub kit of it at Menards for something like $7. It has all the advantages* of two-part epoxy, but it stays where you put it instead of running out like thick syrup.

* - Doesn't need clamping pressure to be strong, great gap-filling properties, when cured, it is just like plastic, is super strong.