Over the last few weeks, I’ve been hard at work building my new shell. I decided to hold off on posting progress here until there was something substantial to report, and because of the slow pace of work, it’s been a while. But I’m now ready to tell all.
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Tag: plywood
Are you sitting comfortably?
Having cleared the decks, so to speak, I wanted to make sure I got the proportions for the new shell correct. To do this, I need to be able to sit in the approximate right place, at the right height, and be able to measure to the various places I can move, as well as the outer dimensions of the shell itself. So, first thing, I decided to fix up one of my recently-acquired Ford Galaxy seats with a base to bring it to the right height. Read More
More MIP fun
Build progress goes very slowly at the moment, as it has been for some time. I’m not finding much time to get any work done. But this weekend I have managed to do a little bit more on the MIP frame; specifically on the glareshield. Short update and photos follow… Read More
Shut that door
I’ve been meaning to get around to the main door for the sim for a while. Today I finally got down to it.
The door itself is a simple construction – a small amount of framing plus the usual 6mm plywood skin. From the inside, the door is intended to resemble the existing vestibule wall; nothing unusual or fancy like portholes. From a simulated POV, the door to the sim should be at the rear (where a false door will be marked and painted for effect), whereas the actual door should be a wall. So keeping things hidden is the order of the day.
Bringing up the rear
I have acquired a heavy cold. Not that this would be of much interest to cockpit builders or indeed posterity, but I thought it was worth mentioning since, once again, I didn’t get a great deal done today. What I did get done was the rear bulkhead (read: wall) which gives me two completed and skinned sides. I had hoped to get the side door done too, but I ran out of energy and the will to cut plywood mid-afternoon.
The day began early enough, waiting for a delivery from Wickes of some more 6mm plywood sheets. Since almost all the interior skin and non-backlit panel surface will be composed of this, I needed a fair bit more, so I ordered 10 0.6 x 1.2m sheets. Just as well, as I ran out of plywood for the rear bulkhead due to mucking up the cutting of one panel. The new wood duly rocked up at about 2pm. Read More
Tweaking the frame
(On a brief aside – WordPress is normally a great blogging system, way better than Blogger where I started off, but every so often it goes a bit wrong and eats my copy. Thus what appears below has been re-typed, badly, from memory. WordPress admins, take note and sort it out!)
Today was a bits and pieces day on the project. I spent the morning cleaning up the build room a little, getting rid of offcuts and bits of wood and hoovering up all the sawdust. This takes a lot longer than you think because sawdust takes up a suprising volume and there was several weeks’ worth to clear. So a few empties of the dust hopper later, I was nice and tidy. Well, as tidy as the build room ever gets. Read More
Is beauty only skin deep?
This weekend I’ve been getting on with the interior skinning of the enclosure. This is an important part of the build not only because you obviously need an interior surface to keep out the light and enclose the cockpit, but also because it imparts a greater degree of stiffness to the whole structure by filling in the gaps between the framework.
The material of choice for the inner skin is 6mm plywood. This is not particularly strong (you could punch through it without much difficulty, I suspect) but it is light and flexible and the strength it does have is lateral – it would be much harder to pull a piece of plywood apart from the ends than to break it by going through the face. I bought a few sheets of this in my last wood drop, and now it’s going into use.
More fun with frames
So, this weekend I finished off the window framing that had taken over my life, and finally came to a finish that I’m happy with. The window posts consist of two pieces of 18mm x 44mm pine strip, cut and angled such that they present what appears to be a concave-shaped single interior post. Working out the bevels to cut, given the multiple angles involved – front window and side window rakes being 20 degrees and 12 degrees respectively – was a nightmare that I don’t recommend to anyone. A thorough command of 3D trigonometry would come in handy here. Sadly it’s been 20 years since I did 3D trig at school, so I basically just measured and fudged until I had the right angles. Read More
Shell build part 1
So, for the last couple of weeks I’ve been building the basic frame of my new shell for the sim. This bears some brief description before I launch off into the actual build experience.
Sim shells (aka enclosures) are many and varied in type. They range from simple DIY efforts right up to faultless replicas of the nose section of the aircraft being simulated. Some adventurous builders with cash to spare even buy the cockpit from a real, scrapped aircraft and remodel this. While this is obviously the most accurate way to do it, it’s also costly and requires lots of space and metalworking skills; none of which I have. Furthermore, having thought about it, I wasn’t concerned about the way the shell looks from outside. It’s what it looks like inside that counts. So no need to create a near-perfect replica of an aircraft shell, skin and paint it etc. Read More
Base assembly
At the Easter weekend, with my ear back to something resembling normal and my will to live renewed, I set about building the new base for the sim. This was before my weight concerns reared their ugly head and hence I was building with MDF as originally planned.
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