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These articles first appeared in Audax UK's hardcopy magazine, Arrivee, and have been only slightly adapted for the web.
Please read them in the context of their original publication date, as prices, specifications, weblinks and even opinions will change over time.

Hows Your Willie? by DK Benton
A slightly adapted reprint of the article first published in Arrivee, November 1999

To those who heard of my problems on the PBP let me say at once that this letter is about voltage regulators! I decided to take heed of FC’s comments on the Willie Hunt Regulators and invest in one.

The LR3 is a very small package but I could see no way of packing it inside a Cateye HL1500 (I also wondered how it would work with the switching arrangement to reduce consumption built into the HL1500) and so I turned my attention to the Cateye Micro. This has a battery cassette and this proved the ideal place to locate the LR3 and leads were taken from it to the terminals in the cassette so that the normal on/off switch worked.

The only mod. was two small cuts - read on for details of the second - to allow for wires to the external power supply.The battery packs were held in two small purse-type cases slung either side of the stem.. One contained an eight AA holder, the other two four AA holders - these holders could power the HL1500 if the Willie failed. The 12 volt packs were wired in parallel to the Micro via an on/off switch.

Reading the Willie’s blurb I noticed that the LR3 could drive multiple bulbs so I wired up a lead from the Willie - hence the second cut in the Micro body - to a small, trumpet shaped Union headlamp - great beam pattern. So I had the Union as main beam, the Micro as fill-in for fast descents. As back up I had the HL1500 and, having bought an extra Micro cassette, the Micro could be converted back to a standard light.

On PBP I used the Union almost exclusively the beam/brightness being such that it out-performed many of the much vaunted dyno set ups I rode alongside and the Micro was rarely needed. The two 12 volt sets gave a total of 18 hours use and second sets saw the event out with power to spare.

Q - How’s your Willie?
A - Great

DKB

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