Bike rack installation

I've got all the parts manufactured. Assembly is trivial -- just a few 8-32 allen button-head screws. The installation, however, was not quite as trivial as I had hoped. I hit a couple of snags along the way.


First was that the bike is apparently not 100% symmetrical. The mount points for the little hooks under the passenger seat are not at exactly the same location on both sides of the bike. When you machine to tight tolerances this becomes immediately apparent. The difference in height between the front and the rear mount point was greater on the "clutch" side of the bike is greater than on the "brakes" side. Also, the angles of the threaded holes in those points differ somewhat, which becomes quite painfully obvious when using a long 6mm bolt. This was solved by carefully offsetting and enlarging the corresponding holes in the rack until it fit properly.


The second snag was making the little brackets to mount the rack to the grab bar. That turned out to be a royal modeling pain, so in the end they were machined by hand. I just eyeballed the material that needed to be removed, put the piece in a vice, milled that material off, put the bracket back on the bike, eyeballed another section that needed to be removed, put the piece back in the vive... rinse and repeat about 20 times for each side. Here are some pictures of the final result:

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