2.2 Hours -
All along, my plan has been to use the Van’s wingtip landing lights. My personal opinion is that they look much better than the leading edge lights. Plus, something bothers me about cutting a big hole in the leading edge of my wings. It doesn’t hurt that the Van’s kit is cheap too.
Just as I was about to order the lights from Van’s, another builder put his kit up for sale on vansairforce.net. I was able to buy the lights for $90 instead of the $125 charged by Van’s. The kit itself contains four, 75 watt lights and all the necessary hardware to install two lights in each wingtip. Unfortunately, the kit I bought no longer had the instructions with it. However, the setup is relatively simple, and I think I’ve been able to find enough pictures on the internet to give me a good idea what the finished product should look like.
The contents of the wingtip landing light kit, minus the bag of hardware.
Since I still have a couple of days until my wings arrive, I decided to go ahead and start working on the lights. The first step is to remove some excess material from the rear piece of the bulb holders. Just enough is removed to make them identical in shape to the forward portion of the bulb holder. I rough cut the pieces with my band saw and then deburred all the edges and holes.
Everything outside the blue line needs to be cut off so that the shape of the back of the bulb holder is flush with the front.
Next, I attached 3 platenuts to each bulb holder. The platenuts and aluminum pieces can be dimpled and riveted with standard rivets, or the bulb holder can be countersunk and NAS1097 “oops” rivets used to attach the platenuts. Since my dimple dies had plenty of space on the platenuts, I opted to dimple everything and use standard rivets.
My options for the nutplates were to dimple and rivet with normal rivets or countersink and use "oops" rivets...I dimpled.
The nutplates were easily dimpled and riveted with my squeezer.
The lights are mounted onto a faceplate using 3 screws per light. Adjusting the screws aims the lights, and springs placed on each screw apply tension to the two pieces of bulb holder keeping the bulb in place. Van’s supplies several springs which have to be cut to size. This was as simple as a rough measurement followed by a snip with some wire cutters.
Finally, I started making some angled spacers that have to be cut from aluminum tube stock. These short pieces of tubing have a 70 degree angle on one side and are used to help position the lights at the correct angle. To cut them, I set up my band saw for a 70 degree cut, cut the angled side, and then cut it to length using a tubing cutter. This wasn’t that hard, but it was kind of time consuming. I finished only half of the spacers before deciding it was getting too hot in the garage and calling it quits for the day.
12 angled spacers have to be cut from tube stock. 6 down, 6 to go.
