The first project I want to do is to change from carburated to EFI. There is a nice package tray under the seat that is a great place to put the MegaSquirt ECU, power relay's and fuses. Unfortunatly, it is plastic and attached the the rear 'fender'. If we ever (heaven forbid) crash and want to replace the plastic, we'd have to remove all the EFI wiring first.
I decided to make a new underseat tray out of sheet metal, and seperate it from the rest of the rear fender. First, I made a sketch of what I wanted.
I'm a big believer in mocking things up before commiting them to final material. In this case, poster board was the material of choice. In take one, I found out that the seat latch was in the way, or my tray was just a little too long!
Whoops, won't quite sit down.
There is that pesky little latch. Sure glad this is made of easy to change poster board!I shortened the tray by 3/4" and tried it again. Since I can shorten this with a rotary cutter and a bit of tape, it took all of 5 minutes to make this change.
That's better, it sits flush now.
And now it clears the latch, and I can operate it to unlatch the seat. Once the tray sat down OK, I folded the flaps over to go around the sub-frame tubing. Originally, I had planned on welding these tabs to the sub-frame, but now I don't think that is necessary. As you can see, it lines up with bolt holes in the back and front so it will be held in place with the same hardware as the rest of the rear fender.
Finally, I had to cut away the old undertail from the rear fender. What I needed was a cut-off saw; what I had was a Dremel with a 1/8" drill bit. 247 holes later, and a little sawing with a Xacto saw and I had a very rough hole. A little trimming with a utility knife, files, and finally coarse sandpaper and it's not so bad.
I still have to transfer this to sheet metal. I may just find a local tin shop to bend this up as I don't have a sheer or a brake. At least I can hand them a full size ready to go pattern!
Ken