Project: TerryS     -     Entry

Apr 22, 2020 8 r/h wingtip lens Category: Lighting
It was raining and about 65 degrees today, so I was a little hesitant to mess with the plexiglas wingtip lens, but it seemed really flexible still so I decided to go for it.
I logged 8 hours for this, but more than 1/2 of that was digging through tubs of old paperwork and running back and forth to my laptop to look stuff up. I never was able to find instructions for these lenses. I searched VAF and found a thread where somebody said written instructions came with the wingtips, but since my wings are used, I didn't get them, or at least can't find them, so I just looked at some threads on VAF to see what most people were doing.

Seems pretty obvious that you just split the blank bubble in half and then trim each half to the recess to make one sense for each wing. I also found an ISO view in Vans supplemental drawing for nav lights where you can see that they put one screw in the corner top & bottom and call it good.

I cut the blank in half with an abrasive wheel on my dremmel to make the rough left and right halves. Held the rough blank on the wingtip and marked it with a sharpie for an initial trim. Turns out that this particular plexi is soft enough that you can cut it with aviation snips with no problem.

I snuck up on this by trimming a little bit at a time and then finished in the belt sander. Worked fine but took a long time. Now that I've done one and know what to expect, on the other wingtip I think I can do pretty much the whole thing with snips and then just dress the edges on the sander.

I've got one area where it doesn't lay quite flat so I decided to "help" with an extra fastener or two. Anyway, it seems kind of lame that this thing is only held on by a couple of #6 countersunk screws. I ended up setting it up for 3 fasteners on top and just 1 in the corner on the bottom, per print. I think it's going to work great, but I discovered that I was out of regular #6 nutplates. I've got a ton of floating ones, but they're expensive to use if you don't have a reason to and I'm saving them for the wingtip attachment screws.

Ordered a bunch of K1000-6 from Airparts and will drive across town and pick them up probably tomorrow.

In the meantime, I checked the FlyLED wingtip lights that I bought used a while back. They work fine, but I didn't get a picture because I was testing them with a 9v battery and a couple of jumper wires and didn't have enough hands.

I had forgotten that they were for an RV9 which has a different shape lighting cove in the wingtip. It took a while to figure out placement for them so they look like they fit right, but I have a plan that I think will work.

In one of the pictures below you can see sharpie lines in the cove where the fiberglass will have to be cut out to allow for the diodes and heat sinks on the back of the LED boards.



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