MAX Update No. 64: Glowing With Pride

Reader Contribution by Staff
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I discovered an interesting problem on my way to Rally Green. It was my first trip in the dark with MAX’s new body and…well here, take a look under the front fender and see how I mounted the headlight.

I’d followed Bill Bushholz’ advice and made plywood mounts for the headlight bulbs, and they worked pretty slick. I’d bought a pair of high intensity headlight bulbs from my local NAPA, and they had a feature I’d never seen on a headlight bulb before: the mirroring stopped a little above and below the filaments.

My guess is, this feature reduces the amount of light that gets projected at the stars and the ground, by letting the light come straight through the glass in the back. Pretty clever, but MAX has white gel-coated nose and fenders, they’re translucent, and when it got dark and I turned the headlights on, MAX lit up like a Jack-o’-Lantern. I didn’t think there was a law against that, but it was pretty distracting, and it would have only been a matter of time before I’d be talking to the police about it (“Do you know why I pulled you over?” “Uh…because my car is glowing?”). I needed to make some headlight covers; opaque, cheap, light weight, and hopefully easy. Fortunately they didn’t have to be attractive, since nobody’d be looking under there.

Lucky me; I had some scraps of the perfect material left over from another project, 0.050″ thick black ABS plastic. It’s opaque, lightweight, cheap, and unattractive, and it’s a thermoplastic so it’s easy to work with.

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