I'm slowly grinding my way through all the things that need hooking up in the wings. I've got the Duckworks landing light and taxi light all hooked up. Getting the lens in turned out to be a bit of a Chinese puzzle. I had never had the light assembly and the lens in place at the same time before. The lens is bigger than the hole, and it sits inside the wing skin. You have to manoeuvre it on edge through the hole, then slip it in place. It is a bit like the overwing exits on small business jets, where you pull the exit inside the aircraft, then turn it on edge and throw it out the hole. But with the landing light lens, you do it in reverse, and from outside the aircraft. It turns out that perhaps I should have trimmed the plexiglas on the lens a bit closer to the screw holes. The lens would hit the light mount, which stopped me from getting it into the hole. I eventually unscrewed the attachment screws on one end of the light mount, which allowed me to push it aft, making room to get the lens inside the wing. Then I slid the lens outboard, which allowed me to reach in the hole and reinstall the screws that held the light mount. I need to use a piece of safety wire with a hook bent on the end to help pull the lens forward into the curve of the leading edge skin so I could start the screws.

Yesterday I finished off hooking up the various things in the left wing tip - position light, strobe light and COM 2 antenna. Here you see the wing tip upside down on the wing. The aft end of the COM antenna is secured to the upper surface of the tip with fibreglas.


Bob Archer suggests to do the antenna hookup with the wing tip sitting upside down on the wing. That would work well for his NAV antenna, which mounts to the upper surface of the wing tip. But the COM antenna mounts to the lower surface of the wing tip, so I used two plastic chairs to hold it in place a bit outboard of the wing. The various wires and cables would be running forward as they went from the wing into the wing tip, so by pulling the wing tip aft, I was able to have enough of a space between the wing and the wing tip to make the hookups.


I only put in about 20% of the screws that attach the wing tip, as I have not yet been able to do a functional test on the antenna. I need to pull the aircraft to the door of the hangar so I can try to talk to someone on the radio. I'll wait until I reinstall the COM 1 antenna on the bottom of the fuselage - I took it off to avoid damaging it when I was crawling around under the aircraft all bundled up in my winter clothes.