Serfas Headlight Strap

My Serfas bicycle front headlight broke the other day. It appears to have been due to the rubber cracking and no longer being able to flex. Serfas does actually offer a replacement mount for the huge sum of $8. However it's likely that in a couple years this too will fail and I will again need to replace it.

Now manufacturing a part out of rubber (or at least silicon) is technically something I could do, however I already have some leather and leather is a great material for something like this: It's biodegradable and can last a long time.

I used about 4mm thick leather and it worked well. To build this you'll need a peice around 80mm by 20mm. The final product will need to be about 54mm between pins. To create the bends that hold each pin what you need to do is get the leather wet, then fold it around the pins and clamp it in place. This will force the curve to "set" without damaging the leather in the process. Then sew these two folds in place using leather string. Almost certainly you'll need to trim down the sides around the bends as they tend to become wider when bending, so don't sew to the edge until you've test fit the strap in place. I did some stitches around the one end to keep the pin in place. I'm not sure if it also adds any meaningful strength, but it does work to keep the pin from moving around as much.

The final strap should look something like this:

Tags: Repair