Initial test fit of fibreglass wing tips

My wing kit was just old enough (about 2015-6 vintage) that I received the Revision 0 fibreglass wing tips rather than the Revision 1 and maybe later tips that I have seen elsewhere. The main difference with these wing tips is they lack the bump for mounting the nav light/strobe in a vertical orientation. With these wing tips, these lights will be tipped downwards. I am not sure that this is an issue, but if it is I will consider making a mount out of plastic or aluminium which will blend into the surface once painted, and will provide that vertical mounting surface. In fact this mount will be a lot more compact than the quite sizable lump I see on current wingtips. I will size this mount to closely follow the outline of the nav lights that Sling has provided. The result should look quite good.

In fact receiving these old-type tips is probably a blessing-in-disguise. Other build blogs have detailed the very poor fir of the Rev 1 tips, or at least the early versions that these builders may have received. Much machining and fibreglass work appears to be required to bring these tips up to standard. Perhaps these bugs have long since been ironed out and current kits are being supplied with much improved tips. I have done a lot of fixes and mods happily, but I was not looking forward to what some builders have had to do.

My older tips are possibly from the end of their cycle where the gross quality control issues have been worked out. The fit of these tips is just about perfect. As the most, I will need to build up the front tip a bit with some gelcoat filler, maybe overlaying a bit of epoxy. The trailing tip may need a little bit of fibreglass/epoxy work to bring it into line with the skin 8 folded trailing edge, assuming I do anything at all.