I tried to come up with a fancy license plate bracket that would fit under the rear bevel on the bottom of my weekender. Had to clear the tailgate when it was fully opened and allow for a license plate light. Simple enough, but I was fixated on making it fit on the bevel area. After designing all kinds of angled brackets and stuff to fasten to the bevel, it finally dawned on me that a simple generic license plate bracket fastened to the trailer frame would allow the license plate light to fit on the bevel in such a way that the wires going through the skin came out right next to the trailer clearance light wiring inside the cabin. Plenty of ground clearance for the license plate also. Duh.
Another one that wasted even more time was trying to find an offset hinge that would allow my tailgate to fully open without binding on the edge trim. I needed about 1/2" of offset, but I couldn't find an offset hinge anywhere that would fit. Most were too big. I even called out for help on the Forum. Well, today it finally dawned on me that a standard 3" hinge already has 1/4" of offset built into it so a couple of 1/8" bar stock shims under each leaf would give me exactly the dimension I needed. Voila! Double duh.
I guess the moral of my tip here is that you just need to sit down and think simple when you start getting caught up in some sort of complicated design challenge.
