Hi everyone! Been following the community since the early Lock on days but never really posted!
I've got a doctorate in Mechatronics engineering and i am a holder of a private pilot license. I figured i would put my skills and access to a whole range of prototyping machines to good use so I started working on my very own A-10C cockpit a couple of months ago.
Haven't gotten very far yet, i've got a quite busy work life, but i figured it was time for me to share what i'm doing! This will be a short description with a bunch of pictures, please let me know if you're interested in specific details :)
I started out by water jetting the main panel out of 5 mm thick sheet aircraft grade aluminium.
I spray painted the panel with a primer and a gray acryllic color.
Next I decided to laser cut / engrave a bunch of panels (arm panel, caution panel, CDU panel, etc) from acryllic. In order to do that i started out with spray painting the white acryllic black (so that the white color only will show up where it's been engraved).
After a lot of work the panels turned out quite good. I spent a lot of time finding some nice locking toggle switches, which i finally found on ebay. I decided to buy lathed switch tops from LynxDK (http://forums.eagle.ru/showthread.php?t=138416) which i'm really happy with. I'm in the process of mounting and wiring them up right now! Can recommend LynxDK to anyone looking for the right switch look!
I also bought a landing gear switch from simparts.de (disappointed with the quality i must say).But i think i can modify it to improve it.
I spent some time trying to find momentary buttons with the right click feel, and ended up with a long travel, high force automotive switch which feels great!
I'm currently focusing on electronics. Just designed and ordered a PCB for the caution panel, waiting for it to arrive from china right now. While waiting i'm working on the design of the CDU PCB as well as mounting switches on the panels.
As you can see there's a lot of things going on in parallel, but it's slowly moving forward! This post doesn't do justice to the work put in, so let me know what you want me to go more into details about :)
