chuckcrc,

Hi and welcome to both SimV and to the "Homebuild Cockpits" forum.  It's nice to have another "active" construction project documented here.  And it's nice to now have a fighter cockpit........ as compared to my commercial type "heavy" approach.  (Now we need someone doing a GA type Cessna or something.)

Nice looking setup you have going there.  I like the canopy idea.  Thanks for sharing the pix.  As it develops.... please keep posting updates here.

I fixed the picture postings today so that they showed in the forum rather than as hyperlinks to the pictures.  The image tags are very sensitive to exactly HOW you do them.  You'll get the hand of it.  If you need help...... send me a private message.

I am interested in the rudder pedals I can see in the second shot.  Are those CH Products pro pedals with some sort of moidification?

Are you going to use a "glass cockpit" setup for the various gauges in the pit?  And are you going to go to projection for the oputside display around the canopy?


best,

...............john

PS:  Will.... you looking?  That kind of idea would fit in your garden shed  .

Hi Will & John
thanks for your kind comments on the sim.
The pedals you see are the only ones that I found would work with Microsoft digitial joysticks.The links is
http://home.t-online.de/home/d-hofmann/homeeng.htm
These work very well and I am looking at modifying them for toe brakes. On the Hoffman home page they have a new model of pedals that can be fitted with toe brakes.
I use the sim for flying on Combat Flight Sim 1,2&3 and because of the number of aircraft I hadn't planned on fitting instruments, although I might fir an LCD display and use dual view or some thing similiar to display the instrumnet screen on.
I designed the sim so it could be backed onto a desk so that the monitor could be spun around with the front canopy removed so that it could be use for boring non-flying activities. see photos
regards
chuck

Hi all
there has been a lotr of interest shown in this topic which is great because I wasn't sure if people were interested in WW11 simpits. So I got a few more detailed pics that people may be interested in for building control units like trim/flap of throttle.
cheers
chuck

Good to see someone thinks like me!  I was going to do something similar to that, except with a Corsair, but the guages just cost too much. Interesting to see how this turns out.  Best of luck, Chuck!

-Mike

That looks great. How many hours went into it?

Ozzy

AWESOM!!! TOTALLY AWESOME!!!

Hi all
thanks for your kind words and support. I will try to answer the questions put to me in this thread.
1.I have tried to use thin sheet metal to cover all the control units and this rivited to the wooded base material. I have used about 600 rivits in all with the outside skin being rivited with countersunk rivits to give a smooth finish.
2. the trim wheel is made out of 13mm MDF and is two layers of wood glued together. I marked it out with a protractor and drill holes every 5 deg around the circumferance to provide the finger grips which I then sanded smooth. See pix.
3. the box on the right is used for 14 toggle functions within the aircraft's operations ie. carb heat, tail hook deploy(used for Hellcat in CFS2), wing fold, pitot heat etc. The other switches (red push buttons, rotary sw) provide a momentary on/off functions for game commands.
4. This project started in May 2001 with me designing the electronics to work with a bashed keyboard )see pix). I then built a rough prototype to test the concept and test the electronics before starting to cut wood for the Mustang pit. There have been long periods of in- activity, 6 months sometimes   because of work committments  (I'm a comms tech and travel extensively) but I suppose Iv'e spent about 600hrs to get to where I'm at now.
5. I don't play to switch to a HOTAS setup although I have bought a PLASMA USB control unit that will allow that as I want to stay within the WW11 type theme.
cheers
chuck