The New Hotness

Quite a while ago, I built this slab mount to hold an amateur radio antenna on our daughter’s Tour Easy. It worked fine until the bike blew over and whacked the antenna whip against something solid, at which point the mast cracked.

The antenna screws into an ordinary panel-mount UHF connector secured to the bottom of the slab, with a hole through the slab just large enough to accept the antenna mast. That put all the mechanical stress on the slab, not the connector.

Alas, the new antenna had a slightly different mast outside diameter, so I machined a new adapter to clamp the connector atop the slab. The antenna screws down into the adapter against a brass washer, again keeping the strain on the fitting.

I recently found the commercial mobile antenna cable that I’d been meaning to use on her bike, which required Yet Another Modification to that slab. It turns out that the UHF connector on the cable expects to be secured to sheet metal found in a car body, rather than a half-inch aluminum plate: the threads aren’t long enough!

So I machined circular recesses on the top and bottom to hold the mounting nut and washer, respectively, with 2 mm of aluminum remaining in the middle of the slab.

The recesses are just fractionally larger than the nut & washer, so most of the stress gets transmitted directly to the slab. Even in the high-vibration bicycle environment, I think there’s enough meat in there to prevent fatigue fractures.

I recycled a G-Code routine I’d written to chew out circular recesses. It does a bit of gratuitous (for this application, anyway) spiraling in toward the center, but got the job done without my having to think too much.

The bottom view shows the washer in action. The recess is deep enough that the cable just barely clears the slab.

The top view shows the recessed mounting nut. The nut has an O-ring around the connector threads, but the water will probably drain out through the four through-holes left over from the old panel-mount connector.

I turned the top nut down as far as I could with a wrench & (ugh) needle-nose pliers, then tightened the bottom nut about 1/3 turns with a wrench.

You’re not supposed to notice the crispy edges on the PVC bushing holding the reflector to the antenna mast. The high setting on that heat gun is a real toaster…

The G-Code is over there.