11.01.08
Door Contactors
This week, I made the grand decision to mount the rear turn signals, license plate, and tail-light assembly (which doubles as a brake light and license plate light) onto the rear of the luggage box. Here’s what the finished configuration looks like…
Rear Lighting
In order to mount the license plate, I needed to make a custom bracket.
License Plate Bracket
The bracket is made from a piece of 1/8-inch thick aluminum plate and a piece of 1″ x 1″ x 1/8″ wall square tubing. The two parts are riveted together with standard flat-head countersunk (K1000) aircraft rivets. The curved cut-out on the rear of the bracket is a relief cut-out — it helps the bracket sit flush on the rear of the luggage case.
The next item that I wanted to work on were the spacers for the battery box. Mark suggests that you make these from either foam or wood. I opted to make them out of 3/4-inch-thick PVC sheet because this material is more resistant to battery acid. The spacers are 6 inches high and have had their outside edges (bottom and sides only — not the top edge) rounded over with a router to conform to the inside curves of the battery box. Cutouts were made on a bandsaw to accomodate the front and rear bracketry for the battery hold-down clamps and for the fender pan attach tabs.
Battery Spacers
Forward Cut-Out in Battery Spacers
I’m also including a more detailed photo of the bracketry for the battery hold-down brackets…
Battery Hold-Down Brackets
A left-over job from last week was to fabricate a hold-down bracket for the accessory (motorcycle) battery. Here’s what it came out to look like…
Accessory Battery Retaining Clamp
Having made the decision to mount the rear lighting on the rear of the luggage box, I needed to install some spring-loaded contacts to pass the lighting circuitry off the battery pan and onto onto the fender pan. The use of these contacts will allow me to remove the fender pan completely for maintenance and for demonstrating the innards of the BugE to interested people. The contacts are made by Painless Products and are sold in pairs, in a variety of configurations. Painless makes wiring harnesses and other such goodies for car restoration enthusiasts. By using two pair of the contacts, I have enough for (1) the left turn signal, (2) the right turn signal, (3) the brake light, (4) the tail/license plate light, and (5) a common (ground) wire. That gives me three extra contacts for future use.
Door Contacts
Trying to figure out where and how to mount the contacts took some thinking. In the end, I chose to mount the lower portions of the contacts to the aft side of the aft battery hold-down bracket…
Mounting the Lower Contacts
The upper portions of the contacts will be fiberglassed onto the bottom of the fender pan. The photo below shows the required bracketry mocked up. The large flat horizontal surface of the uppermost bracket will be coated with flox and adhered to the bottom of the fender pan. Then, the bracket will be fiberglassed in place. I’ll show you more photos of the process when I actually do the work.
Flox, if you’re not familiar with it, is a mixture of epoxy and flocked cotton fibers. The mixture ratio isn’t critical. You just want to add enough of the cotton fibers to produce a material of the consistency that you need to do the job. In our case, that’ll be about the consistency of peanut butter. Flox is a structural adhesive. When cured, it has the strength of concrete. The folks who build composite aircraft use it to bond major assemblies together — such as bonding the fuselage bulkheads to the fuselage sides.
Mock-Up of Contact Mounting Brackets
About the only custom tasks remaining are (1) building a mounting bracket for the PakTraker sender and (2) finishing the attach points for the seat belt. Once those are done, I can do all of the fiberglass work on the bottom of the fender pan and the motor cover. Then, it’s on to mounting the fairing.