Geez, no one is posting here? WTF? I can't be the only nerd around...
My latest fiasco, er, project.
EvoTech Tail Tidy. When I bought my Street Fighter I said I wouldn't put one on. Eventually I had to admit how silly the stock plate mount looked. So, I ordered a tail tidy. It seemed expensive for a license plate mount, but once it showed up I realized there was more to it than that. In fact I was impressed with the quality of it. Then I went to mount the license plate on it.
Yeah... no. I'm pretty sure it works better with larger plates, but with the size of a Michigan plate and the shape of the EvoTech mounting surface do not play well together. The license plate bolts want to be where the EvoTech frame is, but not by enough you can just drill new holes in the EvoTech part. And the mounting hardware Evotech supplies isn't anywhere near up to the level of the rest of the kit.
But no worries! I've got a lot of stainless fasteners plus a 3D printer and already made a plate mount for my Superlight. All I had to do was move a couple holes and print a new one. I could have printed up a little test template once I moved the holes, but no. It was a simple mod, go for it. Print the final part first shot.
About 4.5 hours later I had my part. Held it up to the bike. Realized I hadn't figured in the size of the plate surround I wanted to use. Won't work. Oops.
Back to the drawing board. Moved the holes again, things started to get more complicated... printed a 15 minute template instead of a final part (I'm not a COMPLETE idiot...) and found out it still wouldn't work.
There were a few details I wanted to change but that would have taken longer, so I left them and came up with version 3. Printed another template. Good to go. Started up the print for version 3. Watched it start, then went upstairs to do other things. Checked in on it occassionally via webcam to make sure it was still printing. By habit I had turned off the lights when I left the room, but I could see well enough to know it was still putting plastic down and wasn't making a big blob of melted plastic.
4.5 hours after I started printing it (around 1am) I went downstairs to see how it turned out.
Well looky there. At some point not long after I left it, the layer shifted. And then shifted again. As in somehow the printer was slipping the belt or something so the layers were getting offset, As in the part was worthless. Well not ENTIRELY worthless as it proved I had the holes in roughly the right places now but it couldn't be used for anything.
Fine. Print another one. But first I was going to do a couple tweaks to the design as long as I had to reprint it.
So now I'm at version 4. Which was actually version 11 if you go buy saved design levels but it was the 4th one to get prepped to be printed.
I went downstairs, did a couple things to avoid having the layers shift again, fired up the printer, started the print. Watched the first few layers to make sure it was going ok. Figured out why it shifted the layers, no issue this time. Started doing other things downstairs, keeping an eye on the print.
About an hour and a half into the print I noticed it working on a detail I had changed in the latest design. But it wasn't changed here? WTF? Check the computer. Yep. I was printing the earlier version again.
Whatever. It'll work, there will just be some details I hope no one notices.
And that's the TMI version of the story of how I spent 16 hours mounting a license plate to an EvoTech tail tidy after the tidy itself was installed.
There's a crappy picture of tail tidy sans plate, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of me rambling on about spending entirely too much time on the mounting plate. Hang on a minute...
Ok, quick shots but you'll get the idea. Small US plate:
Backside details. Pay no attention to the print quality, surface finish wasn't great on this one but who cares, it'll get dirty instantly anyway. You should have seen the first attempt though. Isn't that how it always works?