Fake Spotlight.. er... Conversion!

People at work have begun to tell me that I have a hole that needs filling... I need to buy a new spotlight for the front bumper! Funds are still a bit tight after summer hols and I'm busy saving for some fancy new brakes so form has follow function in the money department I'm afraid and I can't justify spending up to £80 to sort the light out yet.

I have looked on eBay for some cheap 2nd hand replacements, but it's not just the lamp itself I need, its also the mounting brackets, the bolts etc. One of the bolts has also snapped and is stuck in the hole so that will need drilling out and re-threading too. Long!

But to try and appease the car's fans at work I have instead decided to knock up a fake spotlamp to fill the gap temporarily using, you guessed it, bits and bobs exclusively from the skip at work!

PROCESS:

I started by cutting a spotlamp sized disc out of a piece of clear-plastic insulation-board. This turned out to be the key element to the design as I noticed that the lines down the board mimic the diffuser-lines in the actual light lens. I then cut 1 inch off the end of a wide plastic drainpipe and glued it to the centre of the board to keep the fake light-lens proud of the backplate to match the depth of the real one. To hold the fake lamp onto the backplate I was going to need a fake bracket, so I cut a rough shape out of ABS-plastic [from the mould I used for my carbon wind-diffuser] that was wide enough at the bottom to meet the two screwholes and fixed the fake lamp to it with ally-tape.

Finally I fixed the fake lamp into place, using the original screw holes, with two allen-head alloy bolts and a bit of ally-tape at the top to stop it wobbling.