At this point, everybody in my family except me has had the flu. Kriya was sick a couple of weeks ago, Holly was sick last week, then RJ got sick, puked for 6 hours, and has been sleeping for 2 days. Either I've dodged the bullet or I'm doomed. Time will tell, but as for now I feel fine. Spent pretty much the whole day in the shop today.

Per previous entry, the holes "the boys" had already drilled in the ribs for a home-made mount are in the wrong place for a Duckworks mount, plus their mount wouldn't work for the FlyLed board, so I knew I'd need to make my own. One of the pix below shows where they drilled holes on the end rib, but the black sharpie dots show where they should be for a Duckworks mount. The wing is upside down in the picture.

Dots A & B are staggered about 0.5" which results in the lights being tilted down about 12 degrees. Dot C is "optional" and puts them shining out straight ahead. Seems to me that they should be pointed down due to wanting to see the touchdown zone on final, plus I'm building a tail dragger and don't want them pointing up in the air during taxi & 3 points.

I thought about this a lot and considered shims and other complicated solutions before deciding the simplest solution was to just build my own mounting plates and make the ears long enough that I could stagger the holes in the ears rather than the ribs to achieve the same result. I mocked this up with cardboard to get the dimensions right, and then bent my own mount plates by hand.

All homebuilders know about The Yard store in Wichita, but unless you live here you probably don't know that in addition to the store, they have a second location couple of blocks away just called "The Yard" where they sell bulk surplus tools, aluminum sheets & tube, billet, angle, huge blocks of titanium, military surplus etc. pretty much everything.

They always have aluminum sheet, but it's usually either 4'x 8' or 4' x 12'. They don't have a shear and won't custom cut an order this small, so I've been dropping by any time I was in that part of town, hoping to find an appropriate piece of scrap from one of their custom orders. Earlier this week I hit pay dirt and scored a 24" by 48" chunk of .040 sheet. It's scrap so I don't know what alloy or treatment it is, but it's non structural and I'm going to paint it, so as long as it bends without cracking I didn't care. Especially since they sell it by the pound and I got the whole chunk for $9.

Once I got my dimensions figured out, I cut out sheet stock with snips, bent the flanges with a board and some wood clamps, and finished by hand forming in a vise with an oak block and a dead blow hammer. Came out okay, but it took about an hour and it would have been 5 minutes job if I had a shear and bending brake in the garage :(

Cut a 4" hole in the mount with a fly-cutter and drilled mounting holes in the flanges/ears that correspond with the pre-existing holes in the ribs. The holes in the ears are oversized to 1/4" so with a #8 screw and washer, it will allow for fine-tuning the position before tightening it down. Test fit and everything looks good. Need to finish up by installing nutplates in the ribs and on the LED backplate to mount it to my home made piece of metal art.

Finished off the day by cutting the lens to final size. Centered it on the hole, traced the outline with a felt pen, taped everything up with blue tape to not scratch it. Rough cut on my band saw, shaped final size on the disc sander, and smoother the edges by block sanding with 150 grit sandpaper.

Will layout and drill this to the wing as well as fab the backing straps with nutplates that goes on the back side of the plexi next time.