The bottom part of the battery enclosure was this rather large 3D print. This was only ever a temporary solution, just had no confidence it would survive long at all.
Plan is to use a clear sheet of polycarbonate; it’s strong, I can put lights/oled screen behind it, and I grew up when those clear case Game Boys were cool (or any electronic device for that matter).
Drilling polycarbonate is pretty easy, it’s acrylic you need to watch out for. Both look very similar but have very different material properties. You can actually cold work polycarbonate and maybe that’s what I should have done.
Next step was to bend the two 45 degree angles. Ideally, I’d use a sheet metal bender or a nichrome wire plastic bender but have neither. I do have a heat gun though. Used some bits of wood to limit how much of the plastic would heat up.
Waved the heat gun up and down that gap till the plastic was soft enough to bend. The first problem was some bubbling on the surface. This I don’t care too much about; it’ll be that scratched up the first time this end hits the road that these bubbles won’t be noticeable.
Now for some irony. The idea behind bending it on the frame itself was to get the bend to match up with the frame perfectly, but as you can see that didn’t happen at all 
. I believe the plastics contact with the aluminum meant that it didn’t heat up enough (I’d basically given it a huge heatsink), and as a result the only bit that got hot enough to bend was away from the corner I wanted it to bend around.
Not sure I’m ok with this. Next attempt I might try to insulate with a strip of masonite between the frame and plastic.
Anyway, still had to bolt it together to see what it looked like.
