This week I was working on several jobs concurrently, so I’ll post updates spanning a few days, but focused on specific areas.
I wrapped up the landing lights on the left wing, and finished wiring up the landing lights for the right wing. I still need to enlarge the right wing bracket and paint the cove black, but that should be straight forward now that I’ve done it on the left wing.
The hardest part of these landing lights is the fact that I’m not working from any complete plans. I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to build it, which has given me a new appreciation for the step by step instructions from Vans. The wiring harness from Vans, plus the FlyLED instructions cover the wiring, but the specifics of how to put it all together needed figuring out. I wanted to build a plug on the lights to make it easy for future maintenance, so I bought some 3 wire molex connectors.
First I drilled holes and used a Dremel tool to cut a slot to hold the molex connectors.
Then I started making the wiring harnesses for the lights, with the left light first. I used a solder sleeve to create an isolated join between the ground wires. In the picture below, the flue has melted, but not the solder. Turning up the heat gun and hitting this again melted the solder and created a neat connection. Super easy.
Labels helped make sure I wired the taxi and landing lights into the right ports on the molex connector.
Added some service loops on the back so the taxi light can be removed more easily. This was probably overkill, but better to have too much than too little.
Before installing the left light into the light cove, I bench tested to make sure everything was wired correctly. All good!
I didn’t get any pictures, but I wired up a molex connector to the end of the wiring harness from Vans, and tidied up the wiring in the cove. Then I installed the light, using some locktight to secure the bolts. I’m happy with how it worked out.
I wired up and tested the right wing lights too, but I’ll need to modify and paint the light cove before installing into the right wing.