Just an update on our LED landing light. Looks like it will be smaller than we anticipated, will have dedicated wigwag built into the board, water resistant, and still be very light weight (below 6 oz). The down side to making the light smaller is that it is now a dedicated 12v light and cannot be used at 24v at this time.
The light is now 40W 1.8amp and 4000 lumens. We are playing with two lens styles.
One is a 10 degree beam that has 26700 candela and the other is a 45 degree lens that has 14500 candela. The upside to the 45' is that your airplane will be seen more easily from a wide amount of angles for traffic avoidance as well as peripheral lighting on landing.
This is in comparison to the micro sun which seems to be the most popular with kitfoxes at 1500 lumins and 8000 candela.
I should have some prototype design renderings to show everyone soon.
Kudos to Esser and JF for venturing into the unknown in the efforts to bring down the costs. As mentioned earlier in this thread...you do get what you pay for but some of us just enjoy the tinkering aspect of trying.
I decided to take on a little more weight to off-set cost differences and they seem to be bright enough. My plan is to have them set to a wig-wag most of the time for visibility, but also be able to set them to full on for the occasional night landing.
I started by making a bracket out of aluminum and fixing the light to what I thought would be a good angle.
I looked all over the web trying to find something that could work as clear lenses to fit on the tips of my standard wing tips. No joy, so I'm now knee deep in trying my hand at vacuum forming. I made the vacuum box and today taking a mold of the tip in efforts of making a plug. More to come.
I'm doing similar for my mangy fox project. I'm using a smaller round led that will only need a cover 3" wide. Plexi can bea easily warmed in an oven the let gravity bend it over a male plug. My friend helping on the project has made several this way for other planes.
Av8r3400 Kitfox Model IV
The Mangy Fox
912UL 105hp Zipper YouTube Videos