03 September, 2012

NiteRider Pro 1400 LED failure

Sadly I had to get my feet back on the ground and realize that there is no such thing as a perfect thing, my NiteRider light system broke. More sadly is that I was in a mountain trip, luckily not in a critical situation and I could go on without a problem.

You can read my first review of the product, here.

Next day after I came back home of course I had to troubleshoot the problem. First I thought it was a problem with the connection between the cradle and the battery because the light went off as I pushed things around but in the end it turned out the cable was the culprit.

Battery cradle opened
Releasing the cable and sealed connector from the cradle is pretty straight forward and only requires a decent screw driver and some pressure on the sides of the cradle.
The problem with the red wire
Wire breakage










From what I could tell it wasn't that much of design or quality fault but rather too much abuse on my side. The red wire broke from too much flexing of the cable right were it exits the battery cradle. It wasn't a pretty or easy job to fix it but I wanted minimal impact so I soldered the wire back together and isolated everything with a few layers of black tape.
Job done

It's not as good as new as I'll have to be more careful now and avoid extreme flexing in the area but it will do the job just fine. Bottom line, take everything with a grain of salt, nothing is unbreakable.