I spent a week on the road, then we had all my co-workers over for a big Christmas party, which pretty much ate up the weekend between the prep work, the party and the recovery. Last week I spent several days in Montreal, so I only got a bit of work done.

I did spend an hour sitting in the cockpit with the lights out in the garage, playing around with an LED flood light. I decided to use LED flood lights for the instrument panel lighting after my experience with the Diamond DA-20. The prototype originally had conventional internally lit instruments, which looked just wonderful as long as the canopy was open. But as soon as you closed the canopy you were faced with a sea of reflections in the windscreen. I did one night flight, but it was clearly not an acceptable situation, as the reflections greatly hindered the ability of the pilot to discern lights on other aircraft and the ground. Diamond went back to the drawing board, and came up with a scheme that used three white LED flood lights illuminating the instrument panel. It didn't look as pretty, but it was much more functional, as the even lighting was much less prone to causing reflections in the windscreen.

So, for my RV-8 I decided to go with LED flood lights. I figured they should work acceptably well, be cheap and simple, and should avoid any problems of reflections in the windscreen. I had seen several RV-8s that had LED flood lights mounted in the lightening holes on the canopy bow/roll bar assembly. I used some alligator clips to temporarily power an LED flood light from Van's. I was dismayed to see that the planned location was too close to the panel, and the light had to hit the panel at a very oblique angle, which tended to put large areas of many instruments in shadows. I'll need to find mounting locations further aft to try to get the light hitting the panel at closer to 90°. I also noted that the automatic lighting intensity control of the Garmin GNS-430 and GTX-327 caused them to crank up the display and backlighting when the flood light shown on them. I will probably have to add a dedicated dimmer control for those two boxes.

Last night I started manufacturing small brackets to mount two LED lights.

In retrospect, I'm not sure I made the right decision to go with LED flood lights. It is quite possible that the RV-8 glareshield would adequately prevent reflections form internal instrument lighting. On the other hand, I don't plan to do very much night flight, so I can get by with an adequate system. And perhaps I could argument the LED flood lights with an under-glareshield flood light system, such as those sold by Aero Enhancements or Superior Panel Technology.