Nav Light Ready for Wiring

So, today I took a closer look at the cured epoxy built-up on the nav light fairing. As I thought, way too much epoxy! I went everywhere, trying to escape the sticky crowd when I put it on the wingtip to shape it. Unfortunately it also clogged up area where it was not supposed to go and I hadn't put wax on there as I just didn't anticipated it would be able to get there. I'm speaking of the holes for the attach bracket which will get a nut on the inside of the fairing and that nut wouldn't be happy sitting on anything but a flat surface.


You can see the tool of choice in the right of the picture. I will use this to remove the excess epoxy and to carve out a flat surface for the nuts.

Voila, a bit too much removed but I can rebuild that easily.


Which I did in the following picture. Along with taking a look at the final appearance with the light mounted. Really good looking! BTW: I checked the nav light at that point in time with a 12V battery. It works great! It would even work better if Van's had me run 3 wires through the wing instead of just one. The unit supports separate control of strobe and position light as well as a synchronization wire for the strobes, so they would fire at the same time. While the latter is not really necessary (cuter though) having separate control of the strobe portion would be desirable. Oh well, the string is in there and I can add that if it really bothers me.


And finally I thought it was a good idea to glue those stop nuts to the epoxy to be able to tighten screws that would get loose over time (despite the stop nut feature). So I added some more epoxy to the inside to keep the nuts in place. The main reason was that I noticed when playing around with the light that it would NOT slide onto the attach bracket if on of the front screws was a bit too tight. If I find out about that after I riveted the fairing on then I wouldn't have any way to loosen (or tighten) that screw for making the perfect fit for the light.


Well, that was it. On to the wiring part...