Trent's RV14 Build: Flyleds External Lights

I am a member of the Freedom Formation Aerobatic Display Team, and one of our sponsors is Paul at FlyLEDS. His lights are the gold standard in LED lighting for aircraft, and are even featured on the new RV-15 this year (2025) at Oshkosh.

So it was a no brainer that i was going to use his system. I went for the following lights:

The Essentials wingtip position and strobe lights - I chose this as the RV-14 has cutouts in the wings for landing lights already, so i didn't need the landing lights to be in the wingtips. I also chose the system which allows the strobes to operate in low-power 'flood' mode.
Combo Leading Edge Landing / Taxi Light - I could have gone for the 'seven stars' light, but i had already run 18AWG in the wings, and i would really need 16awg to support the extra amps for the additional lights. The Combo Light is plenty bright enough (see below)!
Tail / Belly Beacon - There is no requirements to have a beacon - many RV's don't, and rely on thier strobes at night when running an engine. I'm not a fan of this, so i elected to use a beacon.

Soldering the Control Board

The control board comes as a kit, where all of the teensy surface mounted items are already soldered on. This was a pretty quick job - around an hour. I used good quality 63/37 solder i picked up in Japan. Every joint was inspected with a loupe to ensure it was sound.

The large resistor is lifted off the board to aid in cooling. I added some silicone under this later to assist with vibration.

The board was then tested as per the installation instructions. The beeps are my multimeter showing continuity on the right strobe channel.

Tail Light

Since i had the board built, i was able to wire up the tail-light to test it worked - as this cannot be connected directly to 9/12v without frying it.

The tail light serves two puposes - it is the tail nav light (white), but is also the tail strobe light. If both are turned on, the nav light is a reduced power white light, then the strobe is a full power flash.

Building the Nav / Strobe Boards

The FlyLEDS system uses circuit boards which are cut to size and installed on the wingtips. The boards are initially cut to size before soldering on any components. They have red and green stickers on them - make sure you don't get them upside down / back to front (as they are identical boards used on each wing, just used upside down!). They are also marked with the solder screen on the boards, but in my case most of this labelling was cut off. The color can also come off the stickers if you wipe the board with iso to clean them, so a good workflow or additional labelling is important.

You can stick the boards on with double sided tape, but i elected to use 4-40 mounting hardware, so i made sure to drill holes in the board where there were not any traces. The back of the holes got a heavy chamfer to make sure the front and back of the boards were not electrically connected. I painted the edges of the boards with a white posca. These boards were pretty straight forward to solder. The tiny LED's didn't need much heat at all. I used the heat settings listed in the excellent instructions.

Initial placement on the wingtips.

Black tape was used so i could get a better sense of where the edge of the wingtip cutout was. It is hard to see and everything is a compound angle.

I just used the old woodworkers technique and drew a line which parralleled the flanges of the wingtip.

They were then trimmed to size - i made sure to align the boards using their power pins - otherwise the color LED's will look mis-aligned once finished.

I laid the boards out as per the instructions, to make sure i soldered the correct components onto the correct boards! Imagine when i went to fly at night for the first time, i had a red right wingtip! oops.

Thermal paste was added to each strobe LED, then shared with another one.

Each strobe is polarised - so you have to be careful not to solder them on backwards.

I tired to avoid solder joints like this.

These are a lot better.

Strobes installed.

Thermal grease was shared for the between each pair of nav lights too.

As per the instructions, i put each one onto the pad in an intentionally offset angle, then used a loupe to check the polarity, and gently rotated it to the correct orientation.

They are pretty tiny!

Classical music and soldering - who needs a therapist.

A paddle-pop stick is good for spacing the resisitors off the BACK of the board (for cooling).

Then came the fun part - i used a 9v battery to test each circuit.

The boards are installed into the wings at 90 degrees to each other, so the terminal blocks are joined with a strip of computer ribbon. This was very stiff, and was not very long. It made it hard to install the green connector once the boards were bolted to the wingtips. So i ditched this, and used some Tefzel wire.

Installing the Nav/Strobes onto the Wingtips

Next came installing the boards on the wingtips. Since the resistors and terminals are on the BACK of the boards, a cutout needs to be made for these items to fit. I made up a masking tape / cardboard template, indexed to the board mounting holes. I was then able to transfer these cuts to the wingtips themselves.

A template was made usign masking tape on the boards, then transferred this to cardboard.

The mounting holes were used as index holes, then i could draw on the required cutout.

Then came the fun part!

The wires i had run through the wing about 3 years ago, finally had a purpose!

The boards are mounted with 4-40 stainless screws and nuts.

Building the Landing / Taxi Lights

Next up i assembled the Landing / Taxi lights. These were very straight forward, and didn't even involve any soldering. These will be mounted in the wings, and the wires will be pushed into the connectors on the board directly, with no connector. I could not mount them in the wings with the wings in the storage cradle. This will unfortunately have to happen later (but is a 5 min job). The landing lights were attached to the mounting brackets with cap head 10-32 black oxide screws and AN365 nuts.

The boards come with the super bright (and extremely tiny) LED lights already installed. This light is the tail-dragger version, meaning the top taxi light is on a seperate board which gets mounted on a nicely machined bit of aluminium - this means it it not pointing into the sky when you are taxiing.

Thermal grease is added to the heatsinks.

Then the heatsink and the LED lens holder are bolted to the board using the same screws. The heatsinks are tapped to accept the screws.

Thermal grease was added under the aluminium angle.

The angled taxi-light plate is screwed to the upper heatsink...

...then the taxi-light board and lens holder are screwed to the threaded holes in the angled taxi-light plate.

Some 3D printed lens guides are installed to try and stop the lens going in crooked, and snapping off the tiny LED at the bottom. Thre are multiple warnings in the instructions about being careful here!

Lenses are installed...

...and the taxi light gets a frosted diffuser.

There are 2 connections on the board - one lights up all 4 lights, and the other lights up just the taxi-light alone.

The taxi-light was pulling close to 1 amp alone.

All four lights together were puling less than i thought however. Probably some resistance in my alligator clips etc. I am assuming 4 amps per wing (hence the 18 awg feed and return).

The Van's PAR36 landing light mount brackets were painted flat black and the lights installed.

They are bloody bright - and this is just one of them!

Belly Beacon

I decided that i would like to have a beacon on my aeroplane - i don't like how people use strobes on the ramp, and all certified aeroplanes i have flown have a beacon, so i purchased the beacon from Paul. This is not made by him, but seems to be a Super Bright LED's product. The intial beacon fried itself in testing, so i emailed the following video to Paul to show him what was going on. Weirdly, it still works - albeit with a very bad smell. Before i had a reply from Paul on the email, i had an email from Australia Post that a parcel was being sent to me from Fly LEDS! - this was only about 30 mins after sending Paul the email. Absolutely stellar customer service! The second beacon works flawlessly.

On with the install - i elected to make up a doubler, and mount the light using the supplied gasket from inside the aeroplane, so only the lens was sticking out. I also made up a nut-plate ring, holding the 4-40 nutplates, so one person can install (and for maintenance in the future).

I drew out a plan for the layout of the doubler, allowing 1/4" edge distance for all the rivet holes.

I drilled a #52 hole in the middle and used a compass to layout the circles, then marked the rivet locations on the doubler.

I drilled a 3/4" hole using a step drill, then filed until the lens of the beacon fit. This is actually the lens off the beacon which caught fire - so was a useful tool in drilling the mounting holes accurately without damaging the real beacon. I then match drilled #33 the beacon mounting holes into the doubler.

I taped a magnet on the inside of the fuse, in the rough location where i wanted the beacon - i had to make sure it was somewhere there was enough height to clear the elevator pushrods.

The magnet meant i didn't go and do something stupid like drill the hole in the wrong place, or off centre, or though the spar etc!

It was extremely handy being able to rotate the fuselage into knife edge.

The doubler was match drilled #40 to the belly skin at the doubler mounting holes.

I used plywood inside to make sure i didn't hit the elevator pushrod with a drill bit.

I then drilled a 3/4" hole in my skins. Nah, wasn't nervous at all.

As you can see here, the stupid step drills always wander. That was the reason for the 3/4" hole. I was then able to file the hole in the skin, to match the hole in the doubler.

The doubler was made round.

The skin was dimpled using nail mandrel (blind) dimple dies.

Instead of fighting with nuts down in the belly, and needing a helper to do so, i decided to make up a nutplate ring for the back of the beacon. This was made up of some 0.025" scrap, and some 4-40 nutplates.

I marked out a nutplate ring.

Nutplates were installed

The doubler was dimpled, then riveted in place with MK-319-BS pull rivets.

Finally, the beacon was installed. Was able to do it solo with the aid of some tape and the nutplate ring. This was a good idea.

And of course, i had to test it out!

Mounting the Control Board

The last step was to mount the control board. Since most of the wires coming from the board are to the wingtips and the tail, i decided i would mount it under the co-pilot's seat. There will be only the strobe and position power, and the board ground which need to be run forward to my switches.

To mount the board, i made a temaplate drilled to #40 at the board mounting holes. I used this to test drill a piece of scrap, and test mounted the board. Once i knew the holes were in the right spots, i drilled a good spot on one of the ribs using the template as a drilling jig, and mounted the board. I also added a cable tie mount for strain relief on the connector.