Never Go Near The Truck Shop !

It occurred to me that it would be a good idea, before doing all the taillight stuff, that I should also think about some toolboxes for the back of the chassis and I needed to carry some extra petrol for the motorbike and the generator while I was at it. Then I thought maybe I could see what was available commercially (i.e. ready made) in the way of toolboxes and jerry can racks. Which just goes to prove that too much thinking is not good for your wallet and you should leave it at home when "going out to check on a few things".
I think I mentioned once before that my shop is not set up for sheet metal so toolboxes would be a bit of a problem. It also occurred to me that I could put some plastic jerry cans inside a toolbox for carrying petrol and that way I could vary the amount of fuel I carried and have usable space when I was not carrying a lot. Made sense to me!
So . . . some little while, and considerable money, later I arrived home with two of these toolboxes. They are a fraction larger than I actually wanted, with regard to ground clearance, but everything else was too far one way or the other so these ones were it.


















You can see from the picture that I also decided it would be easier in the long run to remove the house from the truck to get all the fixing and fitting done. I decided to hang the boxes from two beams across the chassis which required a little bit of remounting of the electrical buses in the centre of the chassis but nothing too drastic. This is the first of them made up, painted and bolted in place.

















I did have it all mocked up before it was painted but somebody distracted me while I was getting the camera and by the time I got back I forgot I was supposed to take photo's so I just pulled it all apart again (old-timers disease).
While I had it all together I did realise that I couldn't get to the bolts for attaching the house once the toolboxes were mounted so the house has to go back before final fitting of the boxes. This means that the tail lights needed finishing so I could put the house back. Back to where I started!
First thing was to record all the wiring codes for how it was originally wired up. Then cut off all the horrible wiring extensions that had been done for the trailer plug connection and wire everything to some connection blocks for simpler reconnection and to allow for removing the tail light bar assembly some time in the future if I ever needed to. These will be mounted inside the chassis in a mounting box when finished.























Next was to temporarily connect all the new lights to make sure everything worked as it should. I was replacing all the old globe lights with new LEDs and sometimes this does not work properly. The flashers tend to cycle too fast and the dashboard indicator for blown globes can light up all the time as the LEDs do not have enough resistance in the circuit. You can get load resistors to add in but they are about $25 each and you need one for each circuit, LH flasher, RH flasher, stop, tail, reverse! Fortunately everything worked OK.













Next in with the extensions to bring the tail light bar out to the end of the house and mount the bar.









The bar had previously been fitted with all the rivnuts for screwing the lights on so it was simple to fit them in place.














All these lights are fitted with short wires, about 300mm, so they all needed extending by soldering on extensions and heat shrink covering the join.























Then feed them all back through the chassis to the terminating block.

Christmas tree effect coming up soon.