Friday, February 1, 2013

Lighting Kit Templates Copied & Inverted

Wednesday turned out to be a 65 degree day as forecasted, so priming of all the landing light components using the Akzo primer went without a hitch using the Harbor Freight airbrush. All and all for an inexpensive airbrush, it works quite well.

It was nice to be able to get two days in a row in the shop without frozen fingers from holding cold soaked tools. However, the warm weather was short lived because as Wednesday evening wore on, the temperatures plummeted from 65 and into the teens over night and have basically stayed there. It is not fun being in the shop any more.

The replacement lighting kit templates to correct the miss sized templates in the drawings arrived from Van’s.  Hating the thought of cutting holes in a page of the plans, the decision was made to take the templates to a blue print service and have copies made. Now the original templates can be left in the instruction book and the copies can be cut up as required to make the necessary hole templates.

Because the RV-12 typically only has one landing light, the only hole template in the plans is for the right wing. Since the left wing is a mirror image of the right, thought it would be a great idea to have the template printed inverted so it can be used on the left wing.  Although the writing is inverted, the template alignment marks and center of hole symbols for the landing light rib holes, lens mounting screw holes and light cutout can now be easily marked onto the left wing.
                            The drawing on the bottom is the inverted template for the left landing light …
                            above it is the template for the right landing light.

The template for the navigation/strobe lighting hole on the wing tip was also copied and an inverted template was made for the left wing tip as well.