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Continued on with the landing lights work today and made some good progress. I started out by making the template that came with the landing light bracket kit. This gave me the location of the holes on the ribs that are used to attach the bracket that holds the lights and so I drilled them. They are the two holes that are closest to the lightening hole. I did this a total of four times, two ribs in each wing.  Next I moved onto drilling the holes that will facilitate the screws that hold the lens in place. You use the metal reinforcement strips as a guide for where to drill the holes. I again did this four times, one on the top and one on the bottom of each cutout.  Then I moved back to the bracket attach points on the ribs. The brackets screw into nutplates so I drilled the nutplate mounting holes and enlarged the screw holes.  Then I attached the nutplates using blind rivets.  After that I turned my attention to the actual mounting brackets which will hold the lights. The HIDs require a ballast. I'm choosing to mount the ballast to the back of the mounting bracket. There are no mounting holes on my ballasts so I'm going with a sticky mounting pad and then zip-ties around the ballast to hold it securely to the bracket. I drilled four holes and then flattened the bottoms with a file to keep the zip-ties from chaffing on the edges of the holes and give them a flat surface to go over. I also riveted the nutplates in which will hold the screws light retainer bracket. In this picture, I have just primed the brackets and retainers.  And here are the brackets and retainers after being spray painted gloss white. I think this looks really good, much better than plain aluminum, and for $4 in paint, why not? I got the idea from Brad Oliver.  Throughout the day, I felt the urge to give my tanks one last pressure test. The left one came out good so I took it to the shower to wash all the soapy water residue off. The right one I actually found a small leak on the baffle so it's a good thing that I took the time to do this!
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| Thanks for visiting! | Last Update: 25 May 2012 |