Late yesterday afternoon when I walked into the shop I realized I had been the victim of yet another squirrel assault in that they took out 3 light bars by gnawing through the wires.  I spent about 20 minutes assessing what damage they did, but since I was working on the top cowling and had light in the center of the shop, I just left these lights inop for now and didn’t spend time to fix them.

I was met with more of the same today, this time they took down the whole front center bay ring of LED light bars.  Only the old original shop fluorescent light bar was left operational.  I took the time to repair these front bay lights as well as the two light bars next to each other in the first pic above.  Then at some point in the evening, the splice on the nubs they left on the first light gave out and I lost the front bay lights again. I just left them until tomorrow as I finished up my layups (below).

Now, before I ever even went out to the shop, I had brunch with Jess and had a couple of activities somewhat holiday related.  So I again got back home later in the afternoon.

I then took a couple of hours to finalize my research and my build plan for the wings’ outboard leading edge lights.  The big change is I decided that I needed to make splashes, which are a fancy name for molds of the wing LE where the lights will be located.  These splashes will be used to both make the light lenses, as well as the internal flange that each lens will attach to.

To make the splashes, I first applied yellow adhesive film to each wing and marked up my light location and shape.  I then covered my markups with clear plastic packing tape as my mold release.  I then cut 2 plies of BID off the roll for each side, and 2 larger single pieces of UNI from scraps for each side.  I then used some larger scraps of BID and UNI to cobble together another 1.5-2 plies more for each side.  I also gathered up 4 paint stir sticks (2 per side) to use as the splash reinforcement cross piece on both the top and bottom side of the splash.

Here we have the top of the right wing leading edge light splash (pic 1) and the left wing splash (pic 2).

And then bottom side of the right wing splash (pic 1) and the left wing splash (pic 2).  The duct tape is to hold the paint stir sticks tight against the wing and the glass (I repaired the tape on the bottom outboard side of the left wing splash).

I had a lot more on my to-do list for the night of course, but the light issue knocked me back at least an hour.  Tomorrow I’ll fix the front bay lights and get back to finalizing the finishing tasks on the strake bottom leading edges, the top cowling and wing LE lights.

Pressing forward!