[aerostealth]

If you look at the three pictured I have posted you will see that The Herndon Boat Tail has a U shaped cavity to allow for visibility of the license plate from the rear of the vehicle. There is a support post which goes down to the the receiver hitch that passes in front of the the plate.

After making templates for my hinged boat tail for my boat tail I have concluded that a more optimal solution would be to panel in the the boat tail so I can remount the license plate on the back of the boat tail. There are a couple reasons to do this that would improve functionality of the boat tail.

First would be improved safety. I want to mount a set of trailer lights on the back of the boat tail and a license plate bracket with lights. These would be wired up to a plug that would hook up to my trailer plug on the rear of the truck. This would give me a second set of lights for the truck when operating with the boat tail.

Secondly this would clean up the air flow coming out from the underside of the truck. In conjunction with under body panels. In short I would then be getting the full benefit of the boat tail which I feel is compromised by this cavity on the bottom side of the boat tail.

Then I would want to retrofit a swing arm mount to the boat tail assembly to allow the thing to swing out of the way for easier access to the tailgate and the bed of the truck. Currently you have to remove the boat tail from the truck to access the tailgate which is no easy task and nearly impossible to do when you are alone.

The whole boat tail needs to be painted Tuxedo Black to match the Aerolid on the truck. currently the boat tail only has primer grey paint on it. Other mods might include a window above the license plate to allow the back up camera to see through the boat tail. While the view would be limited it would be better then the current view inspecting the interior of the boat tail.

Finally after all these mods I could then build my hinged boat tail panels for my boat tail. This project would then be simplified requiring only four panels instead of the current eight panels needed to panel around the cavity. These panels would then be all of the same length (22 inches or less) and only one problem remains.

The license plate assembly would be covered when the panels were folded in unless the parts of the panels that covered in were made of plexiglass. There are two solutions for this problem. One solution is not to fold them in when traveling at all and to only fold them in when the boat tail is in storage. The second solution ins to use plexiglass for the upper and lower panels if this is legal to do so?