Front Headlamp Mount Part 1

While waiting for Kits 9 & 10 to arrive, and the fact that even though it is the first "real" day of spring and it is still colder than a "you know what", and I can't get in the garden yet to start the plantings of my summer vegetable garden, I started on figuring out how to mount my Phare-Majestic headlamp.

I have been scouring the eBay website daily looking for brass auto headlamp mounting forks. My lamp has a center distance of about 8 inches between the mounting holes, most Brass Model T Ford headlamp brackets are around 6.5 inches between center. I didn't think I could re-work the Model T fork mounts, but I finally saw a mounting fork for an unknown brass automobile on eBay for $40. I made an offer for $20 plus shipping (carriage) and it was accepted.

Its made of steel and had been chrome plated, but most of the finish was flaking off. I sand blasted it to clean it up. The center distance between the forks was about 10.5 inches. I figured for $20 it was a deal. It gets me really close to what I think I need, but with modifications. First after figuring out how much I needed to shorten the forks, I manually hacked sawed off the forks.

After hacksawing once more to remove the required amount of metal (one side more than the other due to a slight offset of the main center piece), I test fitted the pieces by holding everything together by hand.

(Just look how good I am with a hacksaw -- haha not really, I had to make final grindings on my grinding wheel to get the pieces to line up that way. I made sure I had enough material to do some final fitting from the hacksawing).

Next I center punched by eye the main piece and fork and drilled an 1/8 inch hole for an 1/8 inch roll pin. The roll pin will help to keep things together for final welding or brazing.

The final test assembly with the forks 90 degrees to the original fork configuration.

And another picture showing the pieces that I removed.

Further along the Lykamobile build, I will finalize all of this and probably braze this all together, smooth out the connections points and paint it black. I envision drilling and tapping a rather large mounting hole in the end and mount it to the front cross member of the frame, but that could change too. I will cover this later in another post at that time. (Part 2 here)

And one last thought, you can see in some of the pictures a blue wire, I have electrified the lamp with a halogen bulb rig that I purchased from Restorations Supply Co. Item # ELE318. Follow this link: Acetylene Burner Post Mounted Halogen Lamps to see this item. It simply mounts to the Acetylene post in the lamp and I threaded the wire through one of the vent holes. I will tidy it up on final assembly on the Lykamobile.