At the end of October, the studio bought a newly launched Wuyang-Honda New Tapas Tapa, which was actually used by Prawn classmates to encourage his daughter-in-law to retake the motorcycle license.
Compared with the electric scooters on the street, Tapa is also light and flexible, and there is no anxiety about battery life, coupled with the workmanship quality of Wuyang-Honda, it is more suitable for cute urban women who have higher requirements for brand positioning and texture, and at the same time do not want to be marked as stereotypical by passers-by.
When unpacking, Prawn said that he planned to "repackage" this tapa to make it more attractive, and at the same time not lose practicality, and most importantly, it had to hit the tip of the heart of the family leader.
In view of this goal, we decided to reshape the appearance and vehicle style around the Pop Mart theme IP that she particularly loves. On the premise of not affecting safety, let Tapa add some functions that are more suitable for girls' use scenarios.
Pop Mart is a cultural and creative brand listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and its products are mainly trendy toys and blind box dolls. It is the first brand of trendy toys blind box in China.
The main retrofit project includes the following parts:
1. Body color and theme decal (including helmet);
2. The seat cushion and handlebar add electric heating function;
3. Add boot sound effect;
4. Install tachograph;
d. Printed handle windshield;
6. The front and rear lamps add details to match the theme
7. Use the head and tail shelves to strengthen the decorative effect and expand the storage space at the same time.
It doesn't seem to be a lot of projects, but without communicating with the actual user (I hope she has the experience of opening the blind box), and at the same time to achieve the whimsical ideas of the prawn classmates, it is still very cpu-burning.
Even if it doesn't involve the performance part, the modification can't be messy. We believe that it is best to carry out a comprehensive design first, and then start after considering more perfection, otherwise it will be a particularly laborious and cumbersome thing to repeatedly adjust the plan and insist on high-quality construction.
Next, here are some specific sharing of this modification project.
Body colour and themed decal (including helmet).
This part is mostly about cosmetic changes, but before we can do that we need to have a cosmetic reference that we want to achieve.
Although the theme of Pop Mart has been determined, there are hundreds of IP images in Pop Mart's products, and it is not easy to choose the most representative one. Xiaobing's opinion is to go directly to the official website and see the one with the best sales;However, Prawn students think that it is better to draw a blind box on the spot, and which one is drawn, so that the modification itself also has a "blind box" effect.
I don't know if it's good luck or not, I didn't draw the "indifferent you" that we hoped for, and it was easiest to achieve the effect, but I won the rare hidden "myself".
This hidden doll is an image of a doll sleeping floating in the blue-purple waves, so our body color is determined to be the blue-purple color of the waves, the skin color and hair color of the character as the main colors.
After discussion, we finalized the construction plan. The body body is sprayed with the pink skin tone of the ** thing, and the bottom of the body is embellished with blue-purple spray spray stickers, and the hair color part is because this Tapa is originally a coffee color interior, so it will not be treated separately, and it will probably look like the following in the imagination.
The next work is relatively simple, as long as the body of the Tapa is removed intact and sent to the paint booth for painting, and then the imagined wave pattern is found into a suitable color, and commissioned to be processed into a car sticker.
However, when it came to the actual placement, we encountered the first difficulty we expected. The bottom side wall of the tapa is a fully inclined bevel, and the shape taken in the expected side view is not enough to completely cover the entire area of the shell.
Fortunately, I was prepared for a long time, first found a blue-purple gradient car color change film, and coated and changed the color of this part of the shell as a whole. The implementation of the specific patch color change film and car sticker is not difficult, first wipe the mounting surface of the shell, spray a thin layer of soapy water before construction to adjust the sticker angle when laminating, and then press the center position of the sticker or car film, and then use a heat gun to soften the sticker and slowly drive out the bubbles.
Don't rush to load the car after the painting and placement work is completed, because there are still many changes to be made in the car shell.
Electrically heated seat cushions and handlebars
The addition of seat cushions and heated handlebars is one of the key needs of our "Care for Women" program. Related accessories are sold in many **, but before construction, we must know that most of the accessories used for heating will have a relatively large power consumption, including horns and lighting modifications.
If we connect these accessories directly to the positive and negative poles of the car battery, although they have their own switches (some also have protective measures, such as voltage monitoring modules, etc.), we will always lose control of the battery power.
If we connect these loads to some of the original power lines of the car body, we have to worry about the load capacity of the original car lines and switches, so we must use relays for the installation of such components.
The working principle of the relay is to use a set of magnetic switches connected to the wiring harness of the original vehicle electrical appliances for judgment control, once the original vehicle electrical circuits are powered on, then the separate lines leading to the high-power load directly connected to the positive and negative poles of the battery will be connected and conducted.
In general, we connect the detection circuit of the relay to the ACC line (12-volt power output controlled by the starting key) of the original car. The first question that many riders want to install electrical equipment is "where is the ACC of my car?".”
In fact, ACC does not need to be found in a large number of wires behind the lock, for the current production and most models with USB power supply, the power supply to the USB power module is ACC. Even models like Tapa have a separate fuse for the USB power supply line in the fuse box, so that if the equipment installed on the USB line is short-circuited, the fuse can be easily checked and replaced.
Once the wiring is complete, the heated handlebars and the saddle itself are installed. To install the heated handlebar, you need to remove the rubber part of the original Tapa handlebar, it should be noted that the length of the original handlebar rubber is measured in advance, and the merchant will generally give two or three lengths for us to choose when purchasing.
To install the electrically heated seat cushion, you need to first disassemble the outer leather of the original seat cushion, glue the heated lining, and then reseal it.
Most of the saddle leather on motorcycles is fixed with door nails, and in the absence of experience, ordinary door nails are easily beaten by our manual nail guns to create a crooked and strange shape. After one or two hundred repeated experiments, the only experience we have gained is that we need to use two hands to operate the nail gun, one hand press the button to hit the nail gun, and the other hand must be fixed against the back of the nail gun to prevent displacement.
Added boot sound
In order to make Tapa more ceremonial, Prawn put forward the idea of "boot sound", that is, after turning the Smart Key smart key switch, the exclusive BGM of this blind box series will be synchronized**.
Compared with other parts, this requirement for boot sound is relatively simple, after all, everyone knows the old stalk of "Tashi Delek". To achieve this function, we need to install a device called a "voice prompter", which is simply a voice ** circuit board with memory and a small speaker with a few watts of power. Connect to the computer via a data cable, and it will be recognized as a USB flash drive. We will need a**sound effect*** to copy in, use the txt text file to simply configure**volume and whether to loop, power on and start** is its simplest way to work.
Install a dash cam
At present, the tachograph products for motorcycles have been very rich and mature, and different models are more just how to better install.
We chose to install the front camera under the headlights, and with Tapa's round "big eyes" to form a cute face. Here, according to the installation size of the camera, it is good to use a hand drill + hole opener to punch holes.
The rear camera doesn't have a suitable integrated installation space at the compact rear of the Tapa car, so in order to better hide the wiring, our solution is to bolt the rear camera to the top of the license plate light, so that the wiring can follow the license plate light harness all the way to the main unit located under the seat cushion.
3D printed handle windshield
The round, spherical ears are typical of the Bubble Mart figures. Prawn's initial idea was to use the headlights as a reference for the position of the eyes, and add a spherical shape to the front part of the car to highlight the personality. However, the central idea of the modification is not to blindly consider the appearance setting, we want to make a car to be ridden every day, not a concept car to participate in the exhibition, so the personality of the shape must take into account the practicality.
Now that the electrically heated handlebars are in place, the round "ears" are slightly moved up to the handlebars, and you can actually enjoy riding in the winter. It's a stroke of genius, with a pair of shape-and-function windshields, combined with the electric heating handles, which have been modified, to keep you warm all winter.
Of course, there are no accessories on the market that can be purchased directly in this part. In the specific implementation, we can only use SOLIDWORKS for 3D modeling as envisaged, and then use a 3D printer to make the real thing.
As the second otaku of the newt, although Xiaobing has both FDM and light-curing desktop 3D printers, there is still no way to meet the needs in terms of the maximum print size, so we have to divide the drawn sample into 5 pieces on the modeling software, and then use PLA to print it out and then glue it into one.
From the experience of making parts many times, it is almost impossible to succeed at the first time according to the idea, and most of the time there will be some conflicts and overlaps that cannot be conceived, so the first printed sample is used for verification.
After some cutting and adjustment of the parts that conflicted with the body, the final choice was to send the finished model to a workshop specializing in proxy printing for processing. Industrial-grade light-curing 3D printers have a larger printing range and more stable and reliable printing quality, and the charge is generally calculated according to the materials and weight required to complete the printing.
Regardless of whether FDM fused deposition or light-curing are used for 3D printing, the final product will definitely have traces of support and lamination. If you want to get a flawless effect, you can only polish it by hand, Xiaobing used the whole body solution, 3 days from 120 mesh sandpaper grinding to 1500 mesh, after the heart-shaped film and transparent varnish spraying, finally achieved a more satisfactory finished effect.
The front and rear luminaires add details to match the theme.
Regarding the lighting part, our main idea is to enrich some details by fitting the theme style of Bubble Mart on the premise of not changing the brightness and lighting effect.
Although the "Everyday Wonderland" hidden doll chosen is an expression with closed eyes, most of Pop Mart's IP characters have a pair of beautiful blue eyes, so we wanted to modify the headlights to highlight the blue and roundness of the eyes, and the taillights to achieve a red heart-shaped appearance with a black translucent blackened light film.
Since the luminaire alteration had to be done internally, the challenge here was not how to remove the headlamp and taillight assembly, nor how to mount and design, but how to open the luminaire assembly that was sealed with black adhesive strips intact.
At the beginning, I planned to use a heat gun to bake and heat and soften the rubber strip before dismantling, but in actual operation, it was found that the heat of the heat gun could only be concentrated in a small part of the lamp, and most of the seals were still welded to death. We also wanted to go to the shop that modified the car lamps, but the store's contemptuous attitude and high price** prevented further communication.
However, seeing the thermostatic oven of the lamp change shop, a bold idea was born. We dug out a round hole in the outer carton of the helmet just enough to fit into the heat gun, and after a simple closure, a "top-of-the-line" oven with a temperature setting was baked, and the next 200 was timed to ...... for 30 minutes
Under the uniform overall heating of the sealed carton, the task of unpacking the lamp assembly was finally successful, and the film and other transformation processes of the inner layer of the lamp were easily completed in one go.
Head and tail shelves expand storage space
Unlike most retro pedals, the compact Tapa is equipped with 16mm diameter steel chrome shelves at the front and back, making it easy to fit a variety of suitcases or trunks, but of course our choice is not to fall into the trap.
In order for the hostess to be able to go out and play with her pets, we used the rear shelf to secure a pet backpack for pets. In order to be more stable and fixed from the bottom and back dimensions, we changed the tail shelf that could have been flattened to a vertical state to fix the back of the pet backpack (adding a cushion after vertical can act as a comfortable backrest), and the bottom surface uses a 7075 aluminum plate to provide a complete plane for the pet to stay.
When you're not traveling with cats or dogs, this pet backpack can also hold enough other items, including half helmets, makeup bags, clothing, and more.
Since the rear shelf is fixed with a complete leather bag, we are reluctant to arrange another leather case or similar accessories in the front part, which on the one hand seems cumbersome and repetitive, and on the other hand, it also reduces the style of the tapa.
After deliberation, we decided to fix a rattan storage basket here to bring a touch of freshness. At the same time, in order to increase the safety of night use, we have set up four COB flood light LED panels on the back of the storage basket that can adjust the brightness, and the warm light power of 3000K color temperature can reach 50 watts (the blind kind) when the warm light power is fully turned on. Of course, in daily use, it is better to turn down the power, and it is good to use it as a daytime running light and create a sense of atmosphere.
If you want to place some small objects, we can also wrap them with hand-cut leather goods to ensure that the items do not fall.
Summary and experience of modification
Although it is easy to say, it took more than a month to complete the changes to this tapa.
We have always believed in the principle of slow work and meticulous work, and during this period, there were also many changes to see that the actual effect was not satisfactory and then pushed back to the situation (I bought three baskets made of straw on the front of the car).
Finally, this tapamat was successfully completed.
Through this renovation project, we are deeply aware that the design of the body and details around a theme is not only a comprehensive and coordinated process, but also the result of continuous compromise with reality.
The various whimsical ideas of the prawn students were finally realized by the Xiaobing students one by one, and more importantly, the female donors were very satisfied with the final result. While there are still many details that could be refined and perfected, the modding itself is much more fun than the end result. I heard that it is popular now