Left Wing - Landing Light Bezel ~ Riveting Aviatrix

13MAY2023 & 14MAY2023

This weekend, I spent a lot of time working on my landing light bezel idea. I was struggling with getting the lens to fit correctly and be installable from the front. So I decided to make a bezel that the lens would attach to and the 'lens + bezel' would be one assembly that could come off when needed.

Tom 3D printed some dies for the press so that I could press a bend into the aluminum bezel. We weren't quite sure how the aluminum would spring back or the exact angle that was needed, so he made the dies match the radius of the nose skin as specified on the drawing (35mm). This ended up being too big of a radius and the aluminum sprung back quite a bit, but it provided a good starting point. I then pressed the bezel around a 1.25 inch pipe and bent it by hand until I got it to match the curve of the nose.

I drilled the holes needed to attach the bezel to the skin and backing strips; I went with 5 screws on top and bottom (final hole size #16). I decided to use nutplates on the backing strips, so I drilled those rivet holes too. I was planning on dimpling the nutplates and backing strips and using flush rivets, but the mini nutplates I bought didn't fit in the dimple dies (didn't think about that when I bought everything, lol). So I ground down a side on the bottom dimple die and that helped. It still didn't get them quite right, but it's close enough and I think it will be fine for this application.

I trimmed the lens down to be the same size as the cutout in the wing (the bezel overlaps the lens by 0.25 inches). Then I used double-sided tape to hold the lens to the bezel. I also used double-sided tape to hold the backing strips to the inside of the skins.

This is my first modification from the plans and I am happy with how it turned out.

Scroll down for the end results!