Landing Lights revisited... LED

As you may have seen in my earlier post I changed out the standard halogen MR16 landing lights for HID lights a few years ago and really liked the improvement in brightness and range of the high intensity lights.  Because of their size, there weren't too many options available and I wanted the brightest I could find. I decided on a pair from Rigid Industries and Joe at A&P did a great good installing them. However, they were not without their problems. The main issue was that I rarely could get both of my lights to come on at the same time. Sometimes, if I cycled the switch it would work but it was hit or miss. After hours of tinkering with it for months, switching parts and calling the manufacture, I just gave up and started to look for a replacement. (I see Rigid doesn't even sell them anymore..) Now there are others out there but I was starting to see if I could find an LED MR16 replacement. Well, so began my long road to make something work.

Now there are a number of MR16 LED's for home use, but there are two issues; brightness and noise. I ordered a number of sample units to see if they would work and quickly found out that anything less than 1000 lumens was not going to work for a landing light. Plus the cheap home improvement store ones would completely interfere with my radios. I wanted as bight of a LED as I could get so I was sure someone out there had done something for the experimental market. Well, none of the Glastar Sporteman owners had a solution but a guy with a Van's RV had. He did a lot of work trying different lights and ended up with a LED CREE flashlight unit that would fit the MR16 mount in the wingtip of his plane! There had to be a few modifications but it would fit in the MR16 housing. The unit was rated for 9-12v and 2000 lumens and sold for about $30! This was great!

So I ordered a few from China and waited 4 weeks for them to come in. (ugh..) I also decided to do something else I couldn't do with the HID's; have the lights pulse or wig-wag for added safety. I looked around for a number of options and decided on a simple solid state unit from this guy. The unit is small and the wiring is easy.

 Mounting the lights and wiring them up was not that big of a deal. I originally wanted to have a three way rocker installed to replace my original light switch but that proved undoable, so I decided to add an additional switch for the wig-wag function. I was amazed how bright they were.

Seems like I'm all set right? Nothing is that easy. With everything installed I went out for my first flight and returned only to find the lights had failed! What had happened? Now these lights will get hot and anyone who owns one the these flashlights know that they can't stay on continuously at high output for very long. They do have a safety feature that will shut down the light to cool off and will cycle back on, but I was certain that with the lights located in the cowl and continuous airflow from the prop there would not be any heat issue. The only other reason I could think of was vibration. Sure enough when we removed the light you could hear something rattling inside. In fact vibration is a problem for any light in the cowl. Since the guy with the RV had his in the wing, vibration was not an issue. I was going to have to find a solution. Through some trail and error and a few different arrangement, Joe was able to open up the LED housing, isolate the offending part and attach it outside the housing with some additional wiring.

If you look close you can see the circuit board is now outside of the cowl light tube and insulated from any vibration. The wiring inside the LED was cheap also so we improved that. After a check on the ground I went flying and everything worked! I have flown with the wig-wag on all the time without any failures. I really can't thank Joe enough for coming up with this solution.