Since I play a lot with trailers, I’d like to be able to pull anything with anything. So as I wire up this little truck, I’m still going to put in a seven blade connector even though 90% of the time I will be using a standard 4-pin connector. And I love my strobes, so I have to put in the four pin aviation connector as well.
Remember I picked up a freebie beat up diamond plate truck box for a full-size truck a while back, and I’ve been cutting pieces out of it for all kinds of things.
I started with the section I had left under the work table. It used to run from the bottom, up the inner bed, over the rail, and up to the lid, about 8 inches wide. I cut off the top piece that had the lip, so I ended up with a 90° bend, with that lip on it.
I cut it to an even width of about 7 inches. I had a 7-blade socket, a 4-pin sheet metal mount connector, and a 4-pin aviation connector already. The aviation connector was the only one I paid for, the rest were horse trading.
I drilled a 2 inch hole for the 7-blade, and a 5/8 hole for the aviation connector, and then I slotted across at an angle to mount the 4-pin trailer connector on a 45° angle. I cut the slot in a way that the mounting side of the mounts was not cut to maintain the integrity of the whole piece. The location was also to keep it up close to the bend, since it’s the one I’ll probably use most, and they would have extra strength the closer it is to the bend. Here’s how it came out:
I misplaced my homemade hole saw template, so I started to make a new one. With all the weird fab I do on little stuff, it’s nice to have something easy like a piece of cardboard with the various holes cut out so I could just see what slides into what instead of fighting the caliper and figuring it out in my feeble brain.
I plan on running a little strut from the bottom to the top to keep it strong from bending when I plug into it, but I’ll be doing that and finishing it after I figure out how I’m going to mount it.
I haven’t thought about if I’m going to do polished aluminum, Silver, Red, black, or flat black finish on it, but it will all make sense when I get that far.