September 19-21, 2020
Our kit of wingtip lights arrived from Flyboy Accessories so we decided to change gears a bit and install these. This kit was incredibly easy to build and install. All the solder points are huge and even a complete beginner can do it with just a little practice. We spent a half a day trying to find lead solder in local stores before we realized the kit includes solder in it. It really does come with everything.
I enlisted a little bit of help for this, both Kacy and our friend Nate came out for the the electrical fun. Kacy started on the circuit board while Nate and I started building the light boards. Nate actually did end up lifting a pad from the circuit board due to horrible solder gun control, but they are designed with a ton of fault tolerance, and even with that colossal screw up, there was another access point on the board that we could use and “green wired” a fix. So even if you mess it up, you likely won’t ruin anything.
Made some preliminary cutouts in the wingtips for the board and then slowly opened up the holes so the boards would sit flush. It took some trimming around the edges as well to make sure the plexiglass cover would have room for install too. I did end up drilling the mount holes on one of the boards too close to the edge and had to fill in the hole with epoxy and redrill it. It wasn’t that big of a deal messing things up in fiberglass, a little glue and its all fixed up.
After that it was just trimming and fitting until everything was good to go. We followed the test steps in the instructions and everything worked as it should. These things are incredibly bright in the garage, even when only testing them with a 9 volt battery. I can’t wait to hook everything up to an actual 12 volt source and see what they can do. I’m going to cut the plexiglass covers when I install the wingtips on the wings.
-Paul
(Total Build Time: 645.1)