I finally got rid of the Black Box
I absolutely hated Suzuki’s idea of what they thought a license plate light should look like on the 1250’s with their big black protruding, boxy license plate light housing and kept thinking what were they thinking of when the designed it, as it surely wasn’t good looks. So shortly after buying my Bandit I improved the looks of the stock light by removing the spacer block which moved it in about 2” and improved the looks a lot, but it was still just a plain ugly looking square box to me, and doesn’t really go with anything else on the bike.
So after getting sick of looking at it again recently, I started looking around on the internet for a replacement, and finally came across a light a great looking little LED license plate light from superbrightleds,com for $5.95 plus $4.95 shipping.
It weighs next to nothing, and casts a extremely bright, cool looking white light. To mount it to the rear fender I had to make up a S/S adapter plate to cover up the flat area were the stock light mounted, as the new light was not quite big enough to cover up the factory cutout in the rear fender, plus I needed more support for the lexan housing of the light so that it would not get crack when I mounted it to the fender.
Since the cutout in the rear fender for the stock light assembly was to large for the 8/32 mounting screws on the new light I needed to make something to support the new light and S/S cover plate so that I would not be relying on clamping pressure to keep everything from moving around, as again I did not want to possibly crack the lexan housing by over tightening the mounting screws, so I came up with some special stepped aluminum washers.
After first roughly checking the diameter of the cutouts in the rear fender for the stock light, I first machined up a test plug to get the diameter exactly the same for a snug fit in the holes, then I machined up two stepped aluminum washers that fit in the cutout from the back side of the rear fender, with the length of the small diameter about .010 less then the thickness of the fender so that it would not keep the light housing and S/S adapter plate from tightening down properly.
The next thing I had to do to get the stepped washers to work was determine what the center to center distance of the two round holes in the fender were, as I had to drill a through hole in each washer for the mounting bolts to pass through, so after holding the washers in each of the holes on the outside of the fender, I measured the distance between the big ends of the washers, then added one diameter of the big end which is .875 to get the center to center distance between the two washers.
I then compared that measurement to the centerline of the mounting holes on the new light and found that they were .045 narrower then the holes in the fender, so I then set each washer up on my mill, and after indicating them in on center, I moved the mill table over .0225 and drilled the through holes for the mounting screws.
Since the through holes were now slightly eccentric, after installing the light housing and adapter plate and mounting screws to the outside of the fender, I placed the stepped washers from the back side of the fender over the screws and fitted them into the holes in the fender and secured them with nylon lock nuts and then rotated each washer around to align the adapter plate to the mounting surface on the fender, and then finished tightening the mounting screws.
I really think the new lights a big improvement over the stock light, and it really cleaned up the looks of the rear of the bike. Now onto the next project.
This picture doesn't do justice to how much it lights up the ground behind the bike which looks pretty cool.
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