Making the bike look a bit more like a Christmas tree

Mechanical: It's milled out of some 6061 Al bar with a clear acrylic window. It is 9"x1"x0.5". It's watertight except for the spot where the wires come in, and the holes for the wires are drilled in the lowest possible spot, so if the water were to get in somehow, that would be a natural drainage point. I've learned a couple of lessons in the process. One is that I have no understanding of how to work with Acrylic. It was a long and painful process. It shatters, it melts, it gets scratched easily, and the glue I used made it turn opaque. The saddest part is that I actually expected something like that and tested the glue on a scrap piece of Acrylic and it looked fine. It turns out it takes about half an hour from the time of application for the damage to set in, so by the time I saw damage on the scrap piece, I have already applied glue to my final work. Argh... The second lesson was that I will never, ever, ever again buy Chinese-made cutting tools. They are not very sharp, not very smooth, and the geometry is occasionally off, and all of those properties are of paramount importance for small cutters used on Aluminum. But I already learned that lesson a while back... Now I simply need to exhaust my stash of Chinese 1/8" endmills. I don't feel like throwing them away, though I probably should. Fortunately, they snap quite often, so I'll be done with them soon.

Electrical: I used 20 red LEDs (5 parallel chains of 4 LEDs each) for the "Daytime Running LIghts". Each LED is 2-3 MCD with a viewing angle of 26 degrees. They are used at full current. For brake lights I used 4 Luxeon K2 LEDs. They are supposed to generate 45 lumens at 350 mA (75

at the maximum 700 mA current, but that probably requires a heat sink, and I was already short on space) with a nice wide 120 degree lambertian pattern field. Beautiful devices, though they are not cheap. I run them at 300 mA. The housing also includes two voltage regulators that keep the current constant to each set of LEDs regardless of the engine RPM.