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With the new riding season upon us, I decided it was time to try to finish up my Pelican case motorcycle luggage project that I started last summer.  When I left off, the cases could be easily mounted and removed from the Givi racks on the bike, but there was no locking at all, leaving the cases vulnerable to theft.  I designed a locking cover for the assembly that would prevent the release latch from being pressed, keeping the cases secure on the bike.

In a rush attempt to make the part last summer, I had created some pretty inefficient G-Code to run the part, and it was taking an extremely long time to complete.  I wandered away from the machine for a minute to fetch a beverage, and unfortunately a piece of lexan I had been using as a chip guard fell over and bumped the emergency stop switch on the machine, so the part was lost.  Fast forward many months to now; I tuned up the G-Code, and ran the first version of the part last night with much more success.

The part seems to work great, though I’m not thrilled with the finish I got.  I’m still investigating the causes, but I think it was partly due to using a cheap 3/8″ endmill, and partly because I wasn’t doing any cooling so I was getting chip re-melt on the part.  I think also possibly my mill being somewhat out of tram is causing more rubbing, which in turn causes more heat buildup and a worse finish.

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