When I was up refreshing my night currency in the rental 172 a few weeks ago, I noticed that Cessna put a little light bulb above the fuel selector valve so you can see it at night. I found this to be a nice touch, and thought it might be neat to put something like that in my airplane too.
I bought a blue LED from the local Radio Shack, and hooked it up to a bench power supply (along with a suitable dropping resistor) to see how bright it is. Yeah, that's probably plenty bright:
I soldered a 1k resistor to one of the leads, which will run the LED at about half brightness. Then I shrink-wrapped the resistor and leads:
I bought a couple different diameters of thin-wall aluminum tubing at the local hardware emporium, and made this little spotlight hood for the LED. The flange at the base of the LED is squared up against the end of the smaller tube, and it's all potted together with JB Weld.
I played with a lot of different mounting locations, and eventually settled on this spot at the forward end of the throttle quadrant. I made a little mounting plate out scrap alclad, painted everything black, and mounted the spotlight with an adel clamp. Although it's tight in there, the throttle cable has plenty of clearance from the lamp.
Here's a wider view. The end of the lamp is not visible to the pilot or passenger, so there won't be any glare.
Hey, how cool is this? I love doing these little custom touches.
