Welcome back to the wings! I’m wrapping up the tanks, but in between tank sealing and riveting sessions I started to do some work on the rest of the wings. Over the last five days I worked on the leading edges, getting the W-423 joint plates deburred and dimpled, and starting work on the landing light installation. No pictures of the joint plates – pretty boring stuff.

The landing lights are more interesting, I’m putting 100w Duckworkslights in both leading edges. The Duckworks kits come with decent installation instructions, and following them I had no problems with the installation. The first step in this process is using the provided template to mark holes on the outboard ribs for the screws that will hold the landing light brackets…

Template for screw holes

…and for the hole that will be cut to let the light out.

Template for light opening

Hole marked for light opening

The next step is cutting the leading edge hole. As you might guess, there’s a slight bit of a pucker factor here because of the potential to screw up the leading egde skin. To make the hole, I pilot-drilled holes at each corner of the hole and opened them up with a Unibit. Then I used a side-cutting bit and a cutoff wheel in the Dremel to rough-cut the whole opening. The side-cutting bits don’t cut agressively so they’re a little easier to control.

Rough-cut landing light hole

I followed that up with a sanding drum on the die grinder, followed by a small scotchbrite wheel on the same tool. The end result was a nice hole. After that, I match-drilled the lens mounting brackets to the skin – sorry, no pictures.

Rough-cut landing light hole