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Reply to "Newton: Idle hands.. a body at rest"

@dlearl476

The trick with the Home Depot stuff is to be discerning.  I have very little HD stuff left on my car, but those driving light wire conduits just look like they belong there.

The stainless steel plate I used was a fabulous idea, right up until I started to try cutting and bending the stuff - Especially that thickness.  I have since learned that Stainless Steel is alloyed with other stuff - like overly starched shirts - to make it amazingly friggin stiff.  I tried a propane torch on it and it laughed at me and refused to bend, even clamped in my 1940's vintage 8" jaw, 80 pound bench vise.  I upgraded to a Bernz-O-Matic TS-8000 MAPP gas torch and only got it to bend a teeny bit (with one helluva lot of effort), so I broke out my "Big Mother" oxyacetylene set with a "Fireball 5000" blowtorch tip.  

Igniting that thing is an adventure in itself, as you start with pure Acetylene which emits clouds and clouds of stringy, coagulated smoke that eventually settles and gets all over everything in the shop, but once you get a flame you increase the Oxygen from zero and advance the Acetylene and the Fireball 5000 takes over and emits a flame/fireball that's about 2 feet long with a roar like an F-4 Phantom jet on steroids.  Give it just a little too much Oxygen and it flames out with the bang of a 16 gauge duck hunting shotgun (always exciting in an attached garage/shop with your wife quietly sewing on a quilt on the other side of the wall).  Once you get a decent fireball going, you chuck up half of that flat driving light mount in the vise and within seconds the exposed half was soon blazing a bright orange and ready for bending.

It was obvious that the screwdrivers I had wedged into the vice for bend leverage would not be sufficient to bend anything other than wet cardboard, so I resorted to the only thing left in my tool box that might work - My Big, F-in, 3-pound hand sledgehammer and began whaling the Pi$$ out of it.  After several episodes of heating, hammering and repeating I got it to a 90 bend, only to find that that part of the body is far from straight up and down (oops...), so I had to re-heat and re-hammer in the opposite direction to get it to open up a little to get the lights aimed more-or-less straight ahead, not up into the sky as aircraft landing beacons. 

THAT is why I recommend using those little wedge-shaped mounting washers that Hella shipped with their lights.  They allow you to aim the lights in any direction and angle them up and down super-easily.  You use two and the wedges allow tilting in any direction so you can dial them right in (although Mike Pickette's bumper mount jobbies look pretty aim-able, too).  

Once I got the angles dialed in, I sanded the back sides for a while with various grit sandpaper to remove most of the hammer blow marks (none of which are visible from the front) and the vise jaw marks and semi-polished them as best I could.  They shined right up and look great and nobody notices the imperfections but me.

Anyway, good luck with your mounts.  I have a piece of truck inner tube rubber between the body and the slightly curved vertical back (to kinda-sorta mimic the curve of the body) but do not use a backing plate on the back side of the body.  I never thought it needed one with the three bolts AND the somewhere between 3/16" and 1/4" thickness of the mount material.  I got the stainless steel from a metal salvage yard and they couldn't tell me from whence it came, only that they had a hell of a time cutting the stuff and had to use a carbide wheel.

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