LED strobe project

[Rich]

After 3 years of working just fine, yesterday I noticed my right wing strobe had quit working. NAV/POS lights still operative. It turned out a connector inside the wingtip had come unplugged. No big deal, right? Except, of course, the hangar was 92 degrees, I could only get one hand up into the wingtip and since my arm totally blocked my view I had to manipulate and reconnect the two sections totally by feel. Altogether about a 2-hour project. A simple fix had I had arms with with no more than 3-inch diameter and lighted eyeballs on my hands. This is like task 3,444 in my life I've had to accomplish this way. And I know I'm not remotely unique in encountering these situations.

It could have been worse, though, as no AMU's were needed in this repair

[Steve]

Rich:

I assume that you have the same Whelen Orion 600 units that I have. On my installation, the harness at the light assembly end is soldered and heat shrinked to the light leads, the other end has the connectors. As you can see below, these harnesses extend about 8 inches out of the wingtip:

Wingtips with Orion 600 assemblies, wiring harnesses

With the wingtips resting on the end of the wing, I had plenty of room to attach the connectors:

Wingtip resting on wing to attach connectors

I did consider using a couple of small Zip ties to hold the connectors together before I replaced the wingtips, but wound up not doing that, mostly for ease of removing the wingtips in the future, should that be required. Plus, the connectors on my airplane seemed to snap together and hold fairly well...

Oh, I have fairly thin arms as well...

[Rich]

Rich:

I assume that you have the same Whelen Orion 600 units that I have. On my installation, the harness at the light assembly end is soldered and heat shrinked to the light leads, the other end has the connectors. As you can see below, these harnesses extend about 8 inches out of the wingtip:

For mine, the shop used the same connectors as the ones at the wingtip/wing intersection for the pigtail connections. This means they are way up inside the wingtip. I could only get one arm in there, reaching through the opening where the power supply used to be.

The connectors at the base of the my wingtip also allow fairly easy removal of it. But the harness does potentially lie on the edge of that forward opening, which I don't like.

I'll be going back into both wingtips when the weather cools. I want to examine the innards more closely with my endoscope and replace the several too-short (17 mm long) 5 mm wingtip mounting screws with 20 mm length.

[OriensFlight]

When the shop that first installed my wingtip LEDs finished the work they showed me a box of parts and asked if I wanted to keep them. Being a hoarder, I said yes. I was expecting the old strobe ballast to be removed, but I also found some metal tubes in the box. Turns out they didn’t know what they were doing and removed the grounding tubes. That shop is fortunately no-longer working on fixed-wing aircraft.

[Rich]

When the shop that first installed my wingtip LEDs finished the work they showed me a box of parts and asked if I wanted to keep them. Being a hoarder, I said yes. I was expecting the old strobe ballast to be removed, but I also found some metal tubes in the box. Turns out they didn’t know what they were doing and removed the grounding tubes. That shop is fortunately no-longer working on fixed-wing aircraft.

There were grounding tubes that go from the end of the wing proper and protrude out through the wingtip into the area of the old 600's and fasten to them. They don't work with the Orions. The shop I used removed those and installed grounding straps from the termination of the in-wing tubes to the Orion Bases. This per Diamond's instruction.

[Steve]

Mine still have the grounding conduits. At the outboard end, they attach to brackets which are riveted to the inside of the wingtip:

Parts to install Orion 600 LED wingtip lights

The brackets are in the two bags at the bottom of the photo. This is in accordance with the Diamond Work Instruction for installation of the LED lights. The brackets were about $100 each, but they made the job very easy. The other bags contain the rest of the assorted hardware for the job.