About a quarter of the way in drilling all these holes, I was kind of wondering: "why was it I needed fifteen different ball positions again? I mean, I kind of really only need two balls, one hanging a little lower than the other." But anyway. I powered through.
I skipped over the detail of registering the second layer of the diagram onto the already-cut steel piece. See how the second layer is just taped on? The reason I skipped that is 1) I don't want to seem like too much of a nerd, 2) it wasn't a great process, 3) I kind of forgot how I did it, and 4) I would never do it this way again now that I know how well the paper held up to grinding. I would have just spent the time all up front to get the complete cutting and drilling layout onto one paper.
I love these 0.032" thick cutoff wheels. They are so, so worth the extra money. I had a big stack of Harbor Freight ones that I was trying to burn through to get back to these. These are so, so much better. It's like a different tool altogether using these.
These are the front clamping brackets all drilled and then cut. In that order. I drew these in Illustrator right over the photograph of the cut and drilled back bracket so that I would know the holes were registered precisely. So I worked from a photo of the already drilled bottom bracket, not from just the diagram of it.
This was a three-way grind-off. I needed to get the paper and adhesive off of the steel. What I really wanted to do was to hit it with the propane torch and take it off that way but I didn't want to put all that heat into this thin, flat steel with no bends in it. So I tried wire brush, flapwheel, and an abrasive wheel. I really didn't think the wire wheel was going to do anything, because I have a pretty much a 0% success rate with a wire wheel doing anything useful. But I thought it would make a better write-up if I tried three different things.
The abrasive wheel won the day. You can see here with the paper partially removed, it was not easy getting the paper off at all. And those black smudges are adhesive left behind. The removal of the paper and adhesive was surprisingly difficult to do. In the end, I used a citrus-based paint stripper to get the rest of the adhesive off. I don't know where my picture of that went. That took off the remaining traces of the adhesive.
This is after the stripping. It came off pretty clean. I think I cleaned it more after this.
This was the episode. "Someone else in a distant corner hears the words of someone else . . ." and all that kind of thing.
I got a little primer on here. Everything looks better with a little primer on it. I didn't sand in between coats because I wasn't too concerned with anything other than protecting it a little from rust. I figured if it really worked out great maybe I'd get it powder coated sometime.
There they are. Two balls. One hanging low. The reason it's so assymetric is that the ball mount in the center is the one I use for my Garmin Zumo XT, which only needs one ball. So I don't want to move the ball mount on the accessory rail just to swap in the tablet when I need it.
That is the back plate fitted, I think that was about 12 hours before leaving on my test trip.