Wingtips – Flyleds – Part 1

With cold weather outside limiting my ability to prime parts, I continue to find things I can get done to make forward progress. For about a month I have been wanting to build my Flyleds works kit but it didn’t make sense to install the electronics until the boards were sanded to their final shape.

With the wing tips moved out of storage, I started with marking the cutout shape based on the template provided by Flyleds. I then quickly cut out the excess material with my multi-tool (This is the perfect tool for cutting fiberglass!). With the basic shape cut out, I install the boards and mark where I need to trim the circuit board / wingtip so everything fits. Initially I manually start sanding as I didn’t want to break the circuitboard on my belt-sander, but then realized I was just making my life difficult for myself. A Beltsander is the perfect way to quickly trim the Flyleds.

Off-camera I solder on all the components and test that everything lights up as expected (using a 9v battery). With those test completed, I bring the board back out again and mark where the wing-tip needs additional trimming due to the heatsinks. I then go to do the same on the other wing-tip.

Only difference is the other wing-tip had some voids under the gelcoat that needed a little touch-up. I sanded everything around the void to make sure I had a good bonding surface and found the void was even bigger than I first realized. No big deal. I had some Evercoat skim-coat on-hand and quickly mixed up a batch, applied it and used a scraper to help give it a rough shape. Came back after dinner and it was ready to sand / clean up. I then just did the same process as the other wingtip. Only thing left to do is drill the holes for the nutplates to mount the FlyLeds to the wing-tip and bench-test everything.