Beauty is Skin Deep

I had a slight malfuntion of the Plasma Torch in cutting the second piece of the lower battery tray.  The vertical axis was having problems lining up, but I decided to give it a shot.  Wrong move.  The torch made contact with the stock and drug it around on several moves.  I could only watch in horror as my precious 5052 sheet was sliced into semi-random chunks.

Time to order more aluminum sheet.

In the meantime, back to the cosmetic pieces.  The fairing is pretty trashed, but staying with my mantra of "use what ya got" for this phase, it had to be sanded and painted.  The sanding was complicated by several sloppy repairs of cracks with some nylon material that didn't bond well to the ABS.

The upper fairing turned out pretty decent, so I may even keep it.

Progress At Last - Lower Battery Tray

Buoyed by the completion of my new bending brake, it was time to tackle the big kahuna:  the Lower Battery Tray. 

Back to the plasma cutter I went

I crossed my fingers and held my breath as I loaded the swiss-cheese like sheet into the brake.

The first bend was one of the two longest ones - could the brake handle a 12 inch long bend? 

It held up like a champ, but the leverage required for the bend almost flipped my work bench over.

The icing on the cake?  The tray actually fits!

 

Of course this piece is only half of the lower tray.  A vertical piece will join the front of this piece to the frame, but that should be a piece of cake. Right?

Bending Brake Redux

Honestly, how long did I think a bending brake made of wood was going to last? It broke while making a bracket for the front fender on some 1/8" aluminum strip. So for the last two weeks, I've been making Brake v2.0 using Aluminum Channels, Iron Pipe, and a heavy duty steel hinge. (design inspired by Dave Clay: http://www.ch601.org/tools/bendbrake/brakeplans.pdf)

Nuff said~!