Mar 19, 2023     Cutting the wingtip lens covers with heat - (0.2 hour)       Category: Lighting

Harbor Freight had a sale over the weekend so I picked up their hot knife cutting tool for $20 to see how well it performs on cutting the plastic of the wingtip lens covers. The idea is that using a hot knife would not have the risk of cracking as a saw might.

I only attempted to cut the plastic lens in half and didn't try to refine it further to the final dimensions. I'm not sure that this method is necessarily the best option, since it leaves a large plastic ridge at the edge, though I suspect that this should be easily removable with a file or sandpaper. I may need to do some more tests on other sacrificial pieces of plexiglass to see how that goes.

  Jan 31, 2023     Adding mounts for landing lights - (2.5 hours)       Category: Lighting

After some research, I decided that my FlyLEDs landing/taxi lights don't need the angle-adjustment capability of the W-00016B bracket since my plane will be tricycle gear and not tailwheel. Therefore, I just needed to mount the FlyLED circuit boards directly to existing W-00017 mount bracket by adding two nutplates on each side of the hole.

So I started by de-riveting the existing W-00017 mount bracket to make access a little easier. This would also allow me to remove the now unnecessary nutplates on the sides that would have attached the W-00016B bracket. Then I drilled the centers for the screwholes and added the new nutplates on the bracket face, and then re-riveted the brackets into the outboard leading edge wing sections. I'll leave the circuit boards unconnected for now, just to prevent accidental physical damage.

  Jan 14, 2023     FlyLEDs control board and cutting wingtips - (2.0 hours)       Category: Lighting

In this session, I finished the soldering and assembly of the FlyLEDs control board. The assembly instructions supplied with this kit was also pretty easy to follow with no major issues.

After I completed the control board assembly, I did a quick test of the 4 wingtip light boards and 2 landing light boards by supplying 12 VDC to the power connectors on each of those. Fortunately, all 6 of those boards passed with blindingly bright lights.

Next, I printed and cut out the wingtip cutout templates from their website, and traced the shapes out onto the fiberglass wingtips. An oscillating cuting tool made cutting out those wingtip areas quite easy, though I did need to refine the edges a little more with a hand file in order to get the wingtip light boards to actually fit.

What's next? Probably time to get back to the finishing the fuel tanks? I might also try 3d printing a case for the controller board using the STL files that are published on the FlyLEDs website.

  Jan 12, 2023     Assembling FlyLEDs lighting - (3.0 hours)       Category: Lighting

I decided to take a closer look at the FlyLEDs lighting kit that I had ordered over the summer, just to verify how it would fit into the leading edge landing light bays. The FlyLEDs circuit board has two mounting holes that are 5" apart. It looks like I will need to either: (1) drill and mount my own nutplates onto the existing W-00017 mount bracket, or (2) order the W-00016B mount and add my own holes since it wasn't designed to fit the 5" spacing required by the FlyLEDs circuit board, or (3) make my own mounting bracket inspired by W-00016B. Using the W-00016B mount, or one like it, would provide some added benefit of being able to adjust the up/down tilt of the landing lights if I ever needed to.

With the FlyLEDs kit already out, I decided to spend a little time assembling and soldering the circuit boards together. The instructions that came with it were pretty nicely written and easy to follow. I also trimmed down the wing tip position+strobe light circuit boards to fit my actual wingtips by using the benchtop belt grinder. In the end, I now have the two combo landing+taxi light assemblies, and the two boards for each of the left+right position+strobe assemblies.

I will mention that even though FlyLEDs says to use the thermal paste very sparingly, I feel that they still ship way too little paste in their kits. Fortunately, I had some extra computer CPU thermal paste in a drawer that I was able to use when I ran out of the supplied stuff.

What's next? I should probably test these boards now that I have them assembled. I might also work on assembling their main controller board.