Wheel mounts and fenders

In this video, we're going to take our motor that's going to be our wheel from our hair dryer, and we're going to find a way to connect it to our tap light housing. So we're marking the screw boss locations on our tap light. And that's where the screws from the tap light connected to the bottom of the tap light housing. And we're going to measure between those. And so we've got about nine centimeters between those, so four and a half centimeters will be right in the center. And we're going to mark that because we don't have a direct line connecting it. We're going to double check those measurements with our ruler on both sides. And it's important that the mark is right in the center so that our wheels line up when we put them in. So we're going to do the same on the other side. Again, it's about nine centimeters across, so four and a half between. And then we're going to just drop that mark down the side. And we're going to use the inside of our tape roll to create the arc that we need for our wheel well. And we're going to measure off of the boss, the screw boss, to the bottom. And that'll be 1.5 centimeters. And we're going to measure off of that. And then we'll transfer that 1.5 centimeters to the outside, and that'll be the top of the arc that we're going to create with our tape roll. So we're going to just line it up with the mark there. And then we'll take our Sharpie, and we'll draw our arc. So once we have our arc drawn, we can begin removing the material that we need to remove so that the motors fit inside of the tap light housing. And now we're going to put on safety gloves. And we're going to use a break off blade knife. The break off blade is probably not the best knife to use for this. I'd probably use an X-Acto knife or another kind of carving knife, but it's the one I happen to have. You can see the blade just snap there, so make sure if you do use this kind of knife that you wear safety glasses. But right now, we're just whittling away at the material. And it's very soft, very easy to cut with a knife. You can just trim it down. You want to just take the material away just a little bit at a time. And then, obviously, you want to try and make sure they stay inside that black line. You don't want to cut too far away. Otherwise your wheel well will not line up with the wheel just perfectly. Of course if you do go a little over, it's fine. It won't hurt anything, but it definitely won't look quite as good. So we're just trimming up the inside edge of that wheel well now and cleaning it up with the knife. And we'll do this on both sides, so it's the exact same process on the other side. So we're lining it up to see if it fits with the motor and it looks like it's pretty well. So we're just lining our motor up with housing, making sure that the opening is the right size. You see the vanes here on the motor, that connects the inner motor surround to the outer motor surround, the surround that basically protects you from the fan blades? We're going to have to remove some of those in order to get the fan to contact the floor. Now the fan is acting like our wheel, and in order for it to move the craft forward, we have to remove the bottom part of that outer housing around the fan, the clear plastic housing. So we're going to remove two of the vanes on the bottom and three on the top. And the two that we're going to keep we just marked with our Sharpie. So the two that we're removing on the bottom, we're using our nipper pliers. So we're snipping those off. And then we're going to take our hacksaw blade, and we're going to clamp the motor in place as best we can. And we're going to take our hacksaw blade and trim off-- just basically cut straight through the outer housing, the outer clear plastic piece that goes around the blades. We want to make sure that we line the two propeller blades up in such a way that when we cut through the outer housing, we don't cut into the propeller blades. Because we want to use those as our wheel. Now this is time lapsed, so it's going faster than normal. But I've already cut through the other side. This side's almost cut through. I'm going to use the nipper pliers to trim off the rest. Then we're going to make sure that we've got enough blade exposed, and it does look like it. We're going to clean up the edges with a break off blade knife. And that's just to clean off the burrs and the rough edges of our motor. Make sure everything is clean and exposed and ready to go. And we're just trimming off the excess there. So now you can see the motor spins freely and can connect with the floor. And on top of the motor, there's a-- we're just checking to make sure it still works and spins freely. So on top of the motor, you can see there's a Sharpie marker mark. And that was drawn from just taking the bezel and putting it over the motor. And so we want to see if we can cut that mark out. And so we're going to take our hacksaw blade, and we're going to cut the plastic housing at an angle so we can try and get as close to that line as possible. So it's at about a 20 degree angle. And we're just cutting straight down to try and cut along that line that we drew with our Sharpie. And the point of this is basically just to get that plastic surround to sort of wrap around the tap light housing. And we're cutting through it. It takes a good bit of work to get it lined up, but since we're doing it by hand we can hold it like that. Now we're taking our nipper pliers, and we're snapping those connections. And we're just going to cut right through the rest of the housing. Now we're pretty close to where we need to be. So in order to get it to fit just right, we're going to need to trim it. And we're going to use our nipper pliers to finish the trimming and make sure that we can get the kind of fit that we want. It takes a fair bit of patience, but I think it's better to take a little bit off at a time than to try and do it all at once and not get a nice, clean fit. So we're just snapping through the different parts there. And you can see that the motor fits nicely against the white plastic housing. So we've got protection on our motor, around our blades, and it fits nicely against the outside. We're taking just a little bit more material off now to make sure that the motor fits pretty well. And again, this material cuts very easily with our nipper pliers. So you could potentially cut the whole thing with the nipper pliers and not use the hacksaw if you wanted to, but I felt like it was a little easier to use the hack saw. So we're just checking our motor out, and making sure it fits, and double checking the connection between the motor and the housing. Giving it a close inspection. You can see that there's a pretty good fit there. We're trying to find out if there's any places where there may be an interference, or the parts don't come together the way we want them to. And we're also looking at how we could fasten the motor to the housing and making sure everything clears. So there are a couple of little nibs, plastic nibs, left from when we cut off the vanes using our nipper pliers. So we're just filing those down so that the motor will sit flush with the Lexan. And the motor needs to sit flush, because we're going to zip tie the motor in place. We're going to hold it in place. And if the motor has those bumps on it, it won't have quite as good a fit. So right now, we're just making marks. We made four little marks there. And those marks go on either side of the motor. And we're going to use those to run our zip tie through. So we'll run our zip tie through from one side to the other. And we're just going to use a quarter inch drill bit. All right, so now we're just removing the screws from our polystyrene housing and getting them out of the way. And we're going to drill our holes that we marked for the motor. And that will allow us to run our zip tie through. And we're just going to clean the edges of the holes up with our break off blade knife there, making sure that they line up with our motor. And they do. And those holes are roughly a quarter of an inch in diameter. Doesn't really matter exactly the size, but as long as they're just a little bigger than your zip tie, you're fine. So we're going to thread the zip tie through. We want to make sure that the bump on the end of the zip tie is on top of the Lexan so that the zip tie holds tightly against the motor. And because the motor has got two levels of plastic, we're putting a little shim in there, just a little piece of extra plastic. And that'll help hold the motor flat. And now we're going to pull the zip tie down. We'll pull it down all the way and snap it in place. You can see now the motor's pretty securely in place. We're going to go ahead and grab another zip tie and do the other side. So we'll grab-- oh we're just pushing the shim the rest of the way in. I forgot to mention that. We want to make sure the shim is tightly secured in there. And the shim is just made out of another-- it's same type of Lexan, same thickness. We just cut a little piece of it that's about half an inch square and stuck it underneath that part of the motor. All right, so one more zip tie on this motor. And the other motor's done exactly the same way, but we're going to run the zip tie through and connect it. Again, the raised portion of the zip tie needs to be above the Lexan. We'll feed the bottom of the zip tie through and pull it tight against the motor. This'll give us the ability to adjust the motor if we need to. Make sure that it's lined up along the imaginary axis between two, where the two motors will be. And as we're tightening that down, we may want to grab a screwdriver to finish tightening it the rest of the way. And we'll leave the zip ties long so we can make some changes later, if we need to undo the zip ties. So basically, that's how to mount the motors for your Bit-zee Bot. The other one's done exactly the same way. Thanks.