lesthegrngo Posted April 4, 2024 Posted April 4, 2024 (edited) Hi all It's been a while as I have been working on my Race Sim rig - I divide my time between the two, with the flight rig dominating the time due to the complexity. However as I started using VR (only on the racing sims!) a while back (therefore negating all the work I did on nice cockpit gauges, dashboards and cockpit parts!) I found that there is a real need for some things to be correct, or at least realistic, from the point of view of tactile feel and feedback. I found that my old open gate double H pattern 'gearbox' was a bit too weak in terms of feel, plus I found that I was inadvertently trapping my fingers in the open gate as I could not see what I was doing. I can assure you that it hurts! So I have been making a new beefier version that uses a simple lever and pivot at the driver end, with all the action being done in a nice solid box further back out of harms reach. I have a little Seig X2 mill I converted to CNC and so am able to make some aluminium and steel parts, but realistically it is limited. Making metal parts takes ages, and due to the limitations of the cheap mill it's based on, it requires a lot of work to ensure the accuracy and finish of the parts is good. However a while back I got the MFP Crosswind pedals, and noted that they were constructed from a plastic laminate. A bit of research made me realise it is a modern equivalent of Tufnol, a phenolic resin based composite that used layers of cloth soaked in the resin and pressed into sheets. I remember it from my apprenticeship, it was used on loads of things, including gears on lathes, so was tough stuff. The modern equivalent is just called phenolic sheet, and Ebay sells it in both black and the original orangey coloured varieties, and I have bought pieces of sheet up to 10mm thick. The reason for telling you all this is that if you have a panel that requires a complicated shape, thin sections, needs to have accurate and clean holes, pockets or other features, this stuff is great. It is easy to machine, can be cut with small diameter cutters generating small chips, low smell (although always ventilate) and is strong and stable. I have been making the gearbox walls and detent parts from this material and it makes really strong parts. It can be tapped, it's resistant to oil and grease, and compared to aluminium allows me to make parts a lot faster. Maybe eventually I will change some parts to aluminium for durability, but only in the really high stress areas. For all the rest of the gearbox assembly this stuff has been really great, and from now on, all my prototyping will use this stuff where possible. So, for those of you looking for a material for those trickier parts that need some strength or accuracy, have a look at phenolic Cheers Les Edited April 5, 2024 by lesthegrngo 2
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