Category: Machine Shop

In the unlikely event our bikes need two running lights or, perhaps, a running light and a headlight, the solid model now builds mounts for the right side of the fairing, as before:

And for the left side:

Ahhh, chirality: love that word.

Those pix come from a cleaned-up version of the OpenSCAD code that finally gets the 3-axis rotations right, after a rip-and-replace rewrite to deliver the ball model with its origin in the center of the ball where it belonged and rotate the ring about its geometric center. Then the rotations become trivially easy and a slight hack job spits out a completely assembled model:

if (Component == "Complete") {
  translate([-BracketHoleOC,0,0])
    PlateBlank();
  mirror(TiltMirror) {
    translate([0,0,ClampOD/2]) {
      rotate([-Roll,ToeIn,Tilt])
        SlotBall();
      rotate([-Roll,ToeIn,Tilt])
        BallClamp();
    }
  }
}

However, putting the center of rotation directly over the center of the base plate means the ToeIn rotation shifts the bottom of the clamp ring along the X axis, where it can obstruct the mounting holes. Shifting the ring by a little bit:

ClampOD*sin(ToeIn/2)

… keeps the ring more-or-less centered on the top of the plate. That’s not quite the correct geometry, but it’s close enough for the small angles needed here.

Aiming the beam slightly higher makes a 400 lumen flashlight about as bright as any single LED in new car running lights:

You can just barely make out the snazzy new blue plate on the left side of the fairing.

A bike’s natural back-and-forth handlebar motion sweeps the beam across the lane, so I think there’s no real benefit from blinking.

The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist: