State of play

My last post brings us more or less up to date with progress on the project. From here on in it’ll be real-time updates, probably a lot shorter and easier to digest, and a lot more building tips rather than grand rants on the state of the world.

This week I have been working on the pedestal, putting some finishing touches to the frame prior to mating it to the main console, and building a mechanism to lock them together in everyday use while still allowing them to come apart.

The parts of the pedestal that I was least happy with – apart from a number of misplaced screw locations – were the exposed edges of the MDF sheets that make up the sides. In hindsight, had I been thinking straight when I built the frame I would have cut the end to fit over the edges, not between them. But having failed to consider the downside I was left with two raw MDF edges which – as previous posts have indicated – just don’t take paint all that well.

My solution was to add wood mouldings as trimming. I had some 20mm rounded-edge moulding strip left over from an earlier attempt at the glareshield, and this was perfect for the job. Two strips cut to length and glued cover the edges of the side panels and provide a nice feature on an otherwise flat and featureless panel. I painted them black to offset the slate gray which is the main surface color for the sim, as black is my ‘alternate’ colour elsewhere on the console; but the end result wasn’t quite satisfactory, especially as I had some visible glue leakage which was hard to clean up. After thinking for a while I masked off a 2cm width at each side of the end corners and sprayed them black too, leaving the strips as black details on a black background which works better and leaves a nice visual feature marking the end of the pedestal; something which I may well copy elsewhere on the console.

A picture speaks a thousands words etc, so here’s a quick snap of the end result:

I’ve also been tidying up and reorganising the build room in preparation for the the next phase of the build, which is  preparing the console interior for the installation of the motherboards, PSUs and SSDs for the main sim PCs. This will require the creation of custom mountings and promises to be quite fiddly. Fun for the weekend, I suspect.