Tail light installed on rudder fairing

30 Oct 2004 Tail light installed on rudder fairing

I bought the Whelen A500 combination tail light and strobe from Van’s, and I just got around to installing it on the rudder fairing today. I’ve read horror stories about how hard it is to get it on there, and they are basically true.

I first tried to epoxy some little nuts in there, since the screws that come with the light are too small for -6 nutplates. That didn’t work, since the screws were so small, the epoxy didn’t have much to grip onto.

Next, I thought fabricating a spacer or shim that I could use to rivet a nutplate to and then rivet this shim to the back of the fairing would work. I did all the work, and then realized that once I’ve decide to use nutplates, I can probably just put them directly into the fairing. That’s what I ended up doing, using a MK2000-06 nutplate, and drilling out the holes in the taillight so that a #6 screw would pass. Seems to have worked ok.