A while back I posted an entry showing a bike littered with reflectors. This prompted a comment from a reader that then spawned an email from another – this Internet thing is crazy I tell you!
The first comment came from veganboyjosh . . . .
For the enterprising bikehacks readers, i offer the following:
Find out who makes the signs your city or county use for roadsigns. Visit their shop. See if they have cut offs of the uber reflective material. Have you seen how big a road sign is in real life? That stuff comes on huge rolls, so the cutoffs that they can’t use can be pretty huge.
I contacted our County sign shop, and they were just tossing the stuff out. Big 3 feet by 6 inch sections of it, stacks and stacks of 4×5 inch pieces, too. It’s adhesive, it lights up like you wouldn’t believe, and it’s reflective from several different angles.
The best part? It comes in all the colors of road signs: Red, blue, green, brown, white, yellow, orange, that greenish yellow…
The shop I got mine from is a smaller sized one, so they don’t make most of the normal standard signs like stop signs or one way signs. They order those from an outside manufacturer. I’m guessing someone reading this either lives near a similar manufacturer, or near a similar sign shop.
This prompted reader W.T., who blogs over at rotelle di velocità (”speed wheels”) to send along the following comments and pictures:
No lights are on in these pics – the reflectors and reflective tape are doing all of the work. The bike came stock with reflectors (typical CPSC style front and rear) and a hub generator driven headlight and a rear red blinky. The tires also have a reflective sidewall too.
How I came to acquire this stash of reflective material (self-adhesive 3M-type stuff) was by contacting a shop that does signs (like highway exit signs, marking guardrails, etc.) and asked if they had any scraps they’d otherwise be tossing out. They said to come by and I got several 8×10 sized pieces for FREE!
I started cutting the pieces to fit various parts of the bike – starting with items like fenders, and eventually working to the frame, fork, rear rack, and wheels.
Since then I’ve been experimenting with making wheel (spoke) reflectors using the bottoms of microwave pasta dishes as backing material. There’s one pic of a drop-bar old 10-speed I installed one of these experimental wheel reflectors on – it’s on the rear wheel, zip-tied to the spokes.
W.T. has lots more photos over on his site so check it out! And as a bonus, W.T. tossed in the following . . .
Also, my buddy Rob (who is a member of Union Bay Cycle team in Seattle and a bike commuter too) and I made a film contest entry for a local town and we’re neck and neck for the “Viewer’s Choice” award – online voting ends Nov 11th. Our film features a local bike shop and a cycling team in a portion of it. We even have a bike mechanic doing a track stand on film *and* Moby granted us rights to use one of his songs as the soundtrack! Readers can view and vote for the film here.
The deadline to vote is November 11th . . . today, so get on it if you want to help out =)
The local hardware sells reflective spray paint. I’m trying it on my helmet, and any part of the bike it lands on. Will be interesting to see if it really does anything. I passed on the glow in the dark spray paint.
Be careful with spray paint around helmets – they contain solvents that can eat through foam.
how did you track down who makes signs? I really want to do this, but I dont know how to even start looking for the people who make signs… help?
Kit thanks I didn’t know that!
yes seriously, would love to see where locally we can pick up this stuff. Definitly need it for my bike.
Its a road bike, and during my commute espeically – its usually dark on the way home. I live in SF. Let me know where to look for these materials, if you have an idea.
That’s an excellent idea. Tweeting this now.
@rapps, the reflective spraypaint is JUNK. It barely works. You’d be better off sprinkling glitter on white glue instead of using reflective spraypaint.
If you live in Tempe AZ, get in touch with our bike advocacy group and you can have some scrap for free. I hooked up with the city sign shop and cleaned them out of all their scraps. See our blog for more info.