Price: £199.99

From: Zyro PLC 01423 325325
www.zyro.eu.com

Test Logbook: Four nights out over the past month, with their fair share of mud, rain and hosedowns to test their weather sealing plus enough flights of big lumpy steps and crashes to make sure everything stays where it’s supposed to.

Cateye are a Japanese electronics company who’ve been turning out neatly designed bike computers and bike lights for as long as we can remember. They’ve got a huge family of front and rear lights, including the monster Metal Halide Stadium.

The ABS (Advanced Battery System) lights are a new series based on a twin NiMH stick battery format (shamelessly swiped from Vistalite) linked to various headlight options.

The ABS 35 uses a 15 watt flood and a 20 watt spot headlights mounted in neat egg-shaped ribbed aluminium housings (originally designed for the first generation Stadium lights. These slide onto a pair of QR handlebar brackets that also fit the rest of the Cateye headlight range (so you can easily stick on a back up light if you run out of battery power.

These lights then plug into a remote switch that bolts onto your handlebars right next to the shifters so you can switch each light on or off without letting go of the bars. The lead then heads off towards the batteries by means of a big length of telephone coiled cable, which gives you plenty of stretch for strapping the batteries on anywhere on the frame. The cable ends in a jack plug that can be plugged straight into the battery, into a twin splitter for both batteries (as on this system). They can even be doubled up again to plug in as many extra batteries as you can afford.

The battery ‘sticks’ clip onto a holder that fits onto bottle cage bosses. If you haven’t got convenient bottle bosses then they’ve got various straps, notches and slots included to lash them on pretty much anywhere.

The final but very important part of the system is the rapid recharger, which will fully recharge a pair of batteries in just over 4 hours with a handy light to tell you when they’re ‘done’.

In terms of lighting, the system offers a good balance of run time and illumination. The 15 watt flood handles most trundling along or climbing situations very happily, switch to the 20 watt spot beam as the speed picks up. If it gets fast AND technical then bung both on for short bursts. The fact that the switch is simple to use (unlike the complicated Nightrider multi-option switch) and right under your fingertips helps this kind of rapid switching immensely.

With just under an hour with both beams, hour and a half with the spot and over two hours with the flood, lighting times aren’t massively long but then this is a powerful system. We had no problem on typical hour and a half night rides using flood all the time plus spot on singletrack and speed sections.

The headlights themselves are tough all metal units, and the handlebar clamps are equally robust, clamping with a baby QR lever that stopped any sort of slippage however much we threw or jolted the bike around.
With all the wiring sections and three separate handlebar clamps to sort out it seemed a bit of a faff at first but once we’d worked out what went where it was no more than a five minute job to whip the whole set up on or off. The assorted lumps, cut outs, notches and strap loops on the batteries meant we weren’t sure we ever fitted them right either but as they never fell off it doesn’t really matter.

The rapid (4.5hr) charger is also really handy for those times you realise you haven’t recharged your lights for the night ride, and it’s already lunchtime. The green light / red light indicator means you’ve no worries about heading out undercharged either.

The only problem with this set up is the amount of extra material in the system. Headlight housings, remote switches, clips and battery stick casings (which have a lot of plastic round them for the size of internal battery space compared to a bag or bottle) bring ‘on bike’ weight up 1240g. You could just run with one light and one battery (550g) though.