I use a Guee bell clipped onto the rubber shifter hood on drop bar bikes. Timbertrail on the flat bar.
I’m another one who has a Spurcycle bell, I’ve slowly over the years accumulated four across my (and partner’s) drop and flat bar bikes. Like some earlier posters I’ve found some testing during installation is helpful in optimising the sound and volume. I’ve found it plenty loud for letting other road and path users know I’m there (except for those with noisy headphones and earphones). Sure there are louder bells out there, but I like the Spurcycle bell design, and they’re manufactured in Portland, OR. Disheartens me to see clones ripping off their design.
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I know this isn’t what you asked, but I have a similar situation on my commute, and I just yell “ding ding!” 
Got the spurcycle and it worked a treat yesterday. It rings for quite awhile after the initial ding which means I can hit it and then concentrate on dodging any bikes that appear around the blind corner. Took a bit of test riding to get it in an ok hand position AND to the tight tension but (fingers crossed) I have it dialed now. Thankyou for the recommendations!
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Actually, didn’t James Huang write an article on this exact topic back at The Old Place?
Competition is inevitable, even if they are direct knock-offs. First movers / innovators have an advantage and can charge a premium, which is 100% what they should do. But as competition increases, you need to find ways to compete against the new players. Spurcycle hasn’t done that, unfortunately.
An obvious area that they should have improved on by now is providing mounting option for riders with aero bars. This has been an issue for years. (And the competition hasn’t addressed it, either).
I can make a Spurcycle work with my Enve AR SES bars because the flat area is not too large, but anyone with a wider flat top is out of luck.
With the caveat that I’m not a lawyer: straight knockoffs of something like the Spurcycle bell may not be illegal, if the vendor isn’t representing them as originals (=counterfeits) and isn’t infringing on any applicable patent, copyright or trademark etc. But they feel generally wrong to me, and thus generally not something I want to support.
@Weiwen_Ng I don’t recall exactly what James or others wrote at the old place about this, but I think the bicycle industry has seen a lot of knockoffs of novel products, the result of which is to harm the business model of the true creators.
The kinds of competition I do want to support include real improvements on existing designs, even when they might be fairly marginal. This would include additional or better mounting options - and, to be fair, also making a bell louder, if louder is a feature someone values, which @wade_wallace did mention.
Beyond the issue of copying someone else’s design, there is also competition on quality (a visually identical product might be inferior, and therefore cheaper), and on other aspects of production and therefore price (made in US vs elsewhere, etc). For my part, just as I personally want to support the original creator of a design I like, I also prefer to support their more-local-to-me manufacturing, even recognizing that it means I pay a bit more.
I realize this is not directly on the OP‘s topic any more…
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Just to be clear, Spurcycle at the time had failed to patent their bell, and Rockbros made a straight up inferior copy. So there was no question of legality.
Right. IDK if there was anything patentable about it! I think mainly it was a clever/attractive/functional industrial design - in that sense similar to, e.g., furniture or fashion, where what’s unique is the design, not the function, and where knockoffs are also very common.
Ding Ding
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