londo-cat

Don't get me wrong Talisman - you are a hellava pit maker! I like the quadrant you've come up with, very inventive and puts a lot of common sense into making things work for a pit. My problem is I want to be as close to the simulated version of the game cockpit, which is always a problem between the real version and the virtual version. Lots of headaches too! I've seen people make the pits out of aluminum, sheet metal, plastic and of course wood. I've always made them out of wood because I lack the metal working skills and tools to make it out of that. Wood is also more forgiving when you overcut something. :smilewink: Bad thing is that they can tend to burn down sometimes! :mad:

All good suggestions. I actually visited close to 20 automotive shops to try and find the floor mats with the fine ribbing. One place I am going to check out is Pick-a-part in Hayward, I can pick up some old used stuff out of an old truck, clean it up and then put it in the pit. Older cars used to have the fine ribb rubber mats.

This might sound like a completely retarded question, but I have been searching for floor mats for the pit for about six months now. I have found out that it is called 'Automotive floor mat' and they refer to the type of mat that is seen in the KA-50 as 'fine ribbing'. I found one place that sells it in rolls, and all I need is about 3 square feet. I think this is what I want, but anyone know where in California I might be able to purchase this? I've checked with automative stores locally here but none of them have it, but wondering if anyone else has run into this problem? I know, its probably not real high priority with most sim pit builders, but I like to try and build my pits with a certain level of detail, hence the need to get the fine ribbing like the simulation has. Yeah, might be stupid, but I think it allows me to get a more immersive experience visually. Any links to on-line retailers would be most appreciated! :helpsmilie:

I like how you use the friction bolt to control the movement of the collector. My next project on my pit is putting in the collector, and was throwing around a few ideas in my head until I saw your collector. In the simulator, it uses a clutch/brake to allow movement, you squeeze the clutch/brake and then move the collector handle to the desired location. My thoughts are to use some kind of friction system along the same lines as yours. Thanks for posting pictures of your collector and it's design! It has really helped me visualize how I want to build my own collector, but seeing how efficient and easy yours is really gets my creative thoughts flowing! :thumbup:

Spent some time working on the pit today, added the APU gauge and condition lights box on the left side of the pit. So far, it looks like things are starting to shape up! :thumbup:

I've thought about that, and while you might be correct, it's more a money issue with me. I have money to build the pit, but then the rest of it like boards and switches always take up my money. I have all the boards, and I am using the EPIC USB boards, so I'll have lots of wiring to do - but I built this cockpit from the perspective of wiring and maintenance! After building a F-16 cockpit, this one was a MUCH more involved one, and the mistakes I made (like wiring as I went along) taught me that if I had setup for wiring and made sure it would all go to a centralized place, it would work better. When building the F-16, I ended up routing and re-routing the wires several times!!! So - while I was going to build a *new* F-16 pit, I abandoned it when DCS came out, and then repurposed the F-16 shell to take advantage of the underpinnings of the F-16 shell which was built on a concept called the 'Wombat' pit. One thing I added to that whole concept was the wire management, and the centralized rear and under-carriage sections which allowed for all the wire management to be routed UNDER the pit and put into the back or the bottom of the pit. AS you can see, the ENTIRE bottom of the pit is actually hollow - and has removable panels along with a ABS 3" pipe that goes the length of the pit from front to back. In each of the compartments in the KA-50, there is a 3" hole drilled in under the floor into each section which allows for a ton of cables to be routed underneath. I *REALLY* wanted centralized cable management with this new pit, and that was the focus here, build the pit, put in the boards after it was all together. Hopefully it will work out as planned. :joystick:

I have to say it depends on the phone. I have a iPhone 3Gs and it takes amazing pictures. All the pics I have taken of my pit so far are from my iPhone! So - depending on the camera and the lighting, it can either be a good thing or a bad thing!

Awesome!

I was thinking of going this route as well, sort of the same thing as F-16 Glass and using a LCD monitor for the gauges. Be cheaper in the long run because you'd need less servo's and either 1 monitor (or two) could be utilized and cut down on costs.

Yeah, the wheels allow me to roll it in and out of the garage when I work on it. Then I have some wheels on the back-end, which I can then turn the whole thing on it's rear to work on the wire management underneath. So far, it's worked as planned and while I have yet to do any of the wire management at least it was planned that way. I hope to begin doing the electronics sometime in 2010.

So finished making the fuel shut-off valves yesterday and kept looking at the way it looked versus the in-game version. I wasn't happy about the way it looked. So I decided to chop it down and make the curvature more aggressive. So gave it a more aggressive angle. While I was cutting it apart, I kept thinking how I was going to wrape a piece of wood over the front of it, then I started thinking about if I could get a piece of ABS plastic to cover the front. So cut off a flat piece of ABS and then screwed it to the bottom then heated it up with some propane to make it bend easier. After about a 1/2 hour I was able to heat it up enough to easily conform to the shape of the wood! Once it had cooled down, I then put it into the pit to see how it looked. But it looked a little too wide. I took it out, and since it was 100cm wide, I took and cut it down the middle and took out 15cm to make it a total of 85cm wide then glued it back together again. Now I think it looks *more* like the in-game counterpart! I can probably move the guide slots for the left/right fuel shut-off levers closer together, but for now, I am just looking to get the size/shape of the closer to the picture. Here is a screenshot from DCS Blackshark - I added an additional 30cm to the bottom of the fuel shut-off and rotor lock/unlock, so mine is a tad bit longer, so not totally being a purist but I think I nailed the size/shape of it though. Well - that's it for now. I will be working on the APU gyro on the left side tomorrow. That's a real small box, but I think it will be an easy piece to make. :smilewink:

Well - an update today (finally). I worked on building the fuel cut-off levers and container. After looking at a lot of pictures from the simulation, I started with *this*, but I imagine it will change a bit before the final configuration is complete. I can actually get away with 3 on-on bat toggle switches with this part, and have been experimenting with the levers using bar metal and taking the end of lever and welding a bell shaped housing to one end of the lever, which covers the bat toggle switch. By moving the lever up and down, you flip the bat toggle switch on and off, and it gives an audible *click* sound when you do that. Same with the Rotor Lock lever. Right now, this is just a place-holder in my cockpit, but I hope to replace it with the fully functional one in the near future! :thumbup:

Just wondering how they are going to track down the owners of those pigeons and balloons! I can just see some stool pigeon now... :doh:

Wow! What a difference a bit of paint makes! One question and it looks like you paint the whole thing white first, when you paint it black, do you put in masking tape where the engraved plates go before you paint it black or is it scraped off prior to the plates being inserted?

Brave man! Building anything from scratch is a real mission, and sometimes worthy of your time, hopefully you won't go bald from all the development cycles in building this stuff from scratch! :joystick:

Ah... to CNC or not to CNC... now THAT is the question! Apparently, it's to CNC. Question answered!

Awesome work there Oakes! You're still using the OpenCockpits boards, right? :book:

Ah yes... prototyping is SOOOO much fun. I can't tell you the hundreds of hours spent on building custom boards when I look at a green bin box in my garage litered with hundreds of failed experiements! Count yourself lucky, it could have been worse!

Looks nice!

Awesome job!

I was traumatized by the inaccurate picture. :megalol:

Hey Oakes - amazing work, but not to throw a bug in your soup... and while it *looks* sound, the spring mechanism looks wonky to me. :huh: You have to pull the handle to make it switch positions right? Which means the spring would have to 'compress' inside the throat during that operation.

Good idea hannibal, I just took a look at the CH Flightstick and yes - looks like it would map over. I'm looking to do the same thing as well - however I want a more realistic KA-50 stick, so I employed a local artist to create the stick in modeling clay. Once it's done, I can then cast it and then pour resin into the mold to create my own KA-50 stick. This will most likely be the *LAST* thing I do on my pit, but I put it on the task list for sure. Your idea of the internals of the CH Flightstick was a good idea though, thanks!

Wow! I have my boards, just have not hooked them up yet! Still building the *pit* to dimensions and then populating each component board as I go along. When I built my first F16, I remember wiring up each panel as I went along, and found that if I did all the wiring at the end instead of each and a time, I saved more time by just making the panels and placing the switches THEN doing the wiring. Much more time efficient, I was also able to plan the cable management much better when I saw where the switches were underneath the panel boards.

Well - most of this is ad-hoc, just going with whatever I can throw together and how it looks. I've actually done quite a bit of work since my last post, but the eagle.ru forums only allow for so space in pictures to be uploaded, so going to open an account on photobucket and then I can post all the links to those pictures here without restriction to sizes of the images.