1 Oct 04 - Finishing the Landing Lights

The only thing that is left to do on the lights is to get the plexiglas attached to the wings - the lights are already mounted and the plexiglas has already been cut to the correct shape.

However, this is the first time I've drilled holes in plexiglas, so a certain amount of experimentation was necessary before I started working with the actual parts. Drilling plexiglas wasn't as difficult as I thought it was going to be - just go slowly, and don't drill a large hole in one go - drill a small one, and then make it larger later.

The tape "handle" you make for drilling the holes in the plexiglas - used to hold it in place when you match drill the holes.	Plexiglas with the metal strips/nutplates on. This is held to the plexi with double sided tape.	Same thing - just a view from the other side.
There's the finished product. The fit is pretty darn good!	These are both good things to have. Why? Keep reading.

I'd like to take a minute and rant about how cool Boelube and Goo Gone are - I ended up using them both during this phase of the project. Let's talk about one at a time:

• Goo Gone - this is a good thing to have because if you make a tape handle to hold the plexiglas in place while you are drilling it, eventually you are going to have to get the tape back off of the plexiglas. The tape that we had left sticky stuff all over the plexiglas, and Goo Gone is (not surprisingly, given the name) designed to take sticky stuff off of other stuff. It doesn't do anything nasty to plexiglas (I tried it with a piece of scrap first), and this is what I used as I didn't have a plexiglas polish. This worked great.
  
  
• Boelube - this is also pretty amazing stuff. You'll want to use it for putting screws into nutplates all over the airplane, but I think it's especially important on these ones. A little back story first - the nutplates that are used on the RV are made to be a not completely circular. The idea behind this is that it keeps the screw from vibrating out once you've gotten it in there, but the unfortunate part is that it's a real pain in the tush to get it in the first time without stripping the screw or gumming up something. Boelube keeps you from stripping the screw and generally makes your life lots easier.
  
  You'll want to use it on nutplates all over the airplane, but on these it's especially important because if you don't get the screw started when you want to, you can end up pushing the nutplate away from the plexi, because it's just held on there by tape. (Yeah. Ask me how I know this.) The end result is that you'll push the little metal strip off of the plexi, it will fall off, and you'll have to take apart the entire mechanism reattach the plexi to the metal strip. Boelube will make this easier, I think, but it also helps if you have the screws lined up (duh) and you can use clecos to hold in the ones that don't yet have the screws in there.

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