We all want to be fabricators extraordinare. Custom stuff adds so much to your car life.
My problem is that because I have a few tools, I feel like I can do stuff that I really can’t. Wife and I are heading off on a week long road trip tonight, and given the amount of driving we’ll be doing, and the inadequacy of the factory head lights I thought it was important to add some auxillary driving lights. My past experience with driving lights has been… not that exciting. Everything I’ve ever bought has left me wondering… upon turning them on… if I had in fact turned them on.
So this time around, I bought the biggest lights I could find… and afford. That meant some 7″ 100W units that I found at Princess Auto… for… $50. Meh. The other lights I’ve had have all been 55W or 80W so… hopefully these do the trick. But where could I mount such big lights? They could have easily been mounted in the stock position, in front of the grill, but… given there gigantic size they would have sat almost flush with the front of the bumper and been… super ugly.
So I decided… to set them back into the grill and trim as required. I made a mount that tied to the front bumper beam, out of some flat bar… but I had an instant problem. Mounting the lights that way meant that the lights had to be mounted before the bumper and the grill. Mounting the lights before the bumper was no big deal, but mounting the lights before the grill, which goes behind the lights, was an issue. I couldn’t find any way around it though… even if I could mount the grill before the lights, the bumper needed to be mounted before the grill so… I was stuck again.
So I sat and I looked and I measured… and eventually decided there was no other way, unless I mounted the lights in front of the grill, which I still didn’t want to do.
My solution was to chop up the grill so that it could slide over the lights and into place.
Bonk.
I think I executed the idea well enough. My cuts are pretty clean and symetrical and in the right place, but I failed to realize the grill hooks into tabs on the body, and the sinks down into place. So… installed… there’s about an inch gap between the grill and the light above the light. It’s not bad… not noticable from a distance… but a little ugly up close. Not happy.
They’ll stay on for now though… and maybe later, when I’m not rushed… I can come up with a better solution. Glad I did it was a spare grill that I chopped up though. Oh yeah… and that chrome has got to go.