This morning I sprayed the last coat of polyspray on the flaps, ailerons, and rudder. I came back to the hangar after lunch to debur the left door skin and start making the landing light bracket. For a while I wasn’t sure if I was even going to install a landing light. It certainly isn’t a required piece of equipment, and while it would be nice to have for flying at night, it’s not entirely necessary. There is some benefit for visibility to other aircraft, both in daytime and at night. While I was at Oshkosh I got a great deal on a AeroLED LED unit that I can put in the nose bowl, so that was a factor in changing my mind in favor of the light. The LED also has a built-in wig wag function (or in this case, perhaps more appropriately called a “wig”). The catch is that I have to come up with some way to mount it in the nose bowl. The unit is a standard PAR 36 size, so I started by ordering a bracket from Duckworks. The Duckworks bracket holds the front of the unit in place, and it was well worth the price, since it saved me a couple of hours of work. I used the fly cutter to make a hole in another piece of aluminum, which will support the back of the LED unit.
I’m not sure how the duckworks bracket was supposed to work exactly, but I found that it would work really well for me if I slightly enlarged the hole. I needed about 1/8″ more radius. I lined it up carefully in the drill press and used the fly cutter to make a significant part of the cut, then will use a rotary file in the dremel to finish the job.
