Cessna 172 Flight Simulator

I gave up on this great hobby.
Found some new ones and there are only 24 hours in a day.

My panel is for sale and anyone interested can bid on marktplaats.nl.

Another update just to mention that nothing has happened. I have been occupied with my new house all summer and did not have any time left for hobbies. I am aiming to rebuild the sim this winter and looking forward to it.

Just a quick update on the sim. Last months I have been moving to a new place. There was a lot of work to do there so no time left for fun. Now things have settled down it is time to repatriate my sim. I will ship it to the new home next weekend and than I hope to spend some time on it. On my wishlist are three outside views and the construction of a shell.

Hope to be posting soon again!

I have made no upgrades to the sim last summer. Havn't used it that much either. Last two weeks I have picked it up and used it to train for lessons again. I actualy forgot how good it works and how realistic it is to train VFR flights. I simulated an overland from EHLE to EHHO. I made a flight plan and I putted the wind direction and force into FS2004. My real life flightplan worked exactly up to the minute in the sim! VFR navigating by water, cities, forrest bodies and highways worked as easy as in real life. Last week we trained Basic Instrument Flying with the VOR so I have ordered the Simkits VOR for the simulator. Next week I should be able to train with the VOR too. I have also ordered the flap selector. Things should be delivered early this week so I will post new pictures soon.

For the moment the sim has been setup now the way I want it for the time being. Only short term improvements will be the seatings and the casing.

Appart from that I will work on small stuff like a trimwheel and flaps lever, maybe the VOR later on.

After the summer I will start to look at a new killer PC with two PCI-Express cards to drive 4 screens.

Tonight I have managed to install VFR Netherlands and it is amazingly acurate! It took a couple of nights to tweak the settings but than you have real photographic images which makes it possible to navigate by real life forest bodies, or cities. This is so much added realism! This week I will install my second 19" screen and than I will post pictures and screenshots.

My sime has been ofline for a while now. I have moved to another appartment (temporarely) but I do have a room to rebuild the sim. It has been put together again now with the same stuff but in another frame. I was surpised to see that everything still worked very well. I took some days off work to finish it and tomorrow I am going shopping for a new 19 inch tft to upgrade the outer vieuw. I have also bought VFR terrain Netherlands which is available now so I should have a nice simulator again by tomorrow.

I will post pictures asap

Today I have ordered and downloaded 'Roads and Railways Benelux'. This is absolutely a must when you want to simulate vfr flying. I plotted a flight plan on my aeronautical chart and tested the FS2004 simulator add-on. All roads (and more) where there as on the real life map. Instead of flying around, trying to get from airfield to airfield by just a heading on the compass (or GPS...) you can now navigate by visual contact with the ground. This makes the sim experience a lot more like the real thing.

P.S. The screenshot has also the 'Benelux waters' add on.

I have build the mixture control exactly the easy same way as the throttle. It was finished in a couple of hours, including the knob. It has no lock or safety pushbutton but than again, it does the job fine at no costs.

Finaly I came around to building the throttle. I have made it using a 10k slide-potmeter and some stuff to make curtain rails. Material costs about 15 euro, nothing compared to over 200 euros to pay for the real (simkits) thing. For the time being my own craftmanship will do just fine. The result is very satisfying. It makes a huge difference compared to using the keyboard. Now I only have to build the mixture, trimwheel and flaps and then I can do away with the keyboard!

So far no real additions to the SIM. Just some buttons and switches. I have acquired a 10-turn potmeter so I am going to build the trimwheel soon. I am also planning to order the magnetos switch, turn-coordinator as well as some 10k potmeters with which I can build the throttle and mixture. A real nice addition would be a Matrox Parhelia card and an extra 20' LCD screen, than I would be able to have a large front view and two 45 degrees sideviews.

The Simkits yoke has been assembled and connected and works perfectly well. Much much better than the CH yoke (at a price ofcourse...). The mechanism is real good and it handles and centers great. I have also started building everything into a sort of movable section. This so I can easily move it aside to be able to work on it from all sides. Next thing to do is to get the throttle build in somehow. I also still have a heading indicator which needs to be assembled. All the remaining gauges have been replaced with pictures for the moment.

After having used the CH yoke for a while I got more and more dissatisfied with it. It is inaccurate and doesn't centre that well at all. So I have decided to order the simkits yoke and hope it will do a better job. I am expecting it today.

After not spending the entire summer behind my sim it is getting time to start building again! Last week I have build the panel into a wooden setup and I have rearanged stuff to set things up. I am just waiting this week for the simkits yoke and two more gauges (attitude and heading). That will more or less make my sim operational. Maybe I need to think of a temprarely substitute for the throttle and mixture (they cost EUR 200 each at simkits)

Simkits had their panels and glareshields on sale so I have put away my wood, saws, glue, file, and paint and i have again drawn my checkbook... The panel looks great! Everythings fits perfectly and looks real and professional. Buying the panel instead of making it realy speeds up things. I did not even have an idea how to start with making my own glareshield. You loose some flexibility but you gain a great panel

I have put in all the gauges I have up untill now (enough for flying the circuit) and I will integrate the yoke next. After that I will have to integrate the switches, throttle, etc. Hint for other builders: use velcro to attach the gauges to the panel, than you don't have tho glue them and they can easily be disassembled again.

So for now I have integrated the CH Yoke into my panel. To do that I had to take the yoke apart and extend the shaft a little. This involved cutting all wires to extend them. The result is looking good enough to delay buying the Simkits yoke for a while..

Now I just need to insert the gauges and some switches and the panel is starting to look like what it should be. For now I have painted the panel with a ground-colour which does not look to bad. When fiished I will paint it with aluminum paint or something.

I have received another gauge, the most complex one to build, the altitude indicator. I missed one little piece which was replaced by Simkits within a day. The altimeter is up and running fine now. I also received the warningpanel. Now it's time to construct the panel because more gauges lying arround my desk will not help creating realism.... I am gone work on that next weekend.

To the right you will see the warningpanel. It was on sale so....

Today I replaced my old rudder-pedals with new ones from CH. They are far more accurate and they have toe-brakes so it is a nice addition to the realism of my sim.

Finaly I have got three 'simkit' gauges up and running. This stuff costs a lot of money but it is great. I can imagine that once build into a cockpit you will not see the difference from the real thing. Might even be better than the real thing! I have ordered the altimeter, which is a more complex gauge to build, yesterday so with that addition I am already able to fly on my 'instruments' only.

The entire cockpit project is not comming along as quick as I would like to see it. One of the problems is that the setup is now housed in the basement and I that doesn't work. So, today I have bought 2 17 inch TFT screens and I am going to work on the cockpit in my livingroom. With the new TFT-screens it does not interupt with my 'interior design' to much ;-)

Yesterday I have acquired another 15' flat screen, I also received a working processor unit for the simkits gauges. So now it's time to put things together and make it work!
I have given up on creating my own yoke, certainly now simkits has the perfect solution available. Creating a yoke yourselfs is very difficult, not the electronics part but the mechanics. I couldn't find a good way to get this done. Maybe because of lack of some good materials. Anyway, simkits has now done it for us, they deliver a cessna172 style yoke, in parts ofcourse, which will do the job perfectly. For now I will get along with my CH Yoke (I have to get used to the idea that the simkits yoke will cost me almost 400 euros)

I have ordered some things recently to make some real progress. The final release of WideView 2004 is available and I have ordered gauges from SimKits. I am building a 1/1 scale Panel, partly with real gauges and partly with gauges on a TFT screen. Later all gauges will be real and I will use the TFT screen for the radiostack. I hope to put up some pictures soon!

Havn't worked on the simulator for a while but I have been using it once in a while. Recently the beta release of wideview for 2004 has become available. I have installed it and made it work. That is actualy what I had been waiting for before continueing the work on the simulator. Now I am sure that I can build it arround FS2004 which should be arround for the next few years. Things to do now are: Acquiring a flat screen display for the instruments (replacement for the CRT which is to large for the setup) and finding another solution to mount the yoke and the instrument panel screen. I also want to find some nice dutch scenery and get the AI and weather to sinc between the server and the client with WideView. Although I have very limited space I want to make an effort to create a 'hardware' instrument panel.

First time in two months that I have worked on the simulator again. The past two months I have picked up real flying lessons and decided to try to get myself a private pilote license. These lessons realy help me in creating a better sim-experience. I have also bought the CH-yoke because my home-build yoke is becomming a project on it's own.... Most important addition now are the rudders and the disable of auto-rudder in FS. Without a yoke and rudders as control you can't even call it flight simming...

After reading some documents on how to connect pot-meters to the com-ports I have started out to build my own yoke. The technical part works fine but the mechanics is more of a challenge. It took a while to get the cog-wheels, which are connected to the pot-meters, running with precission to the movements of the yoke. Only thing left to do is to attach some springs to centre the yoke when no pressure is applied.
In front and to the left you can see the cog-wheels that are connected to the pot-meter which drives the elevator and the aileron.

Finally after a week of tweaking I got the horizon perfectly alligned across the screens. A lot of help was found on the WideView forum. Although it is far from realistic this setup is much, much better than FS on just one screen!

My employer had some redundant 21 inch Eizo screens so I didn't mind picking them up for my Sim. Three of these screens next to each other take up some two meters in width, so I had to move to the basement to keep my living 'FlightSim-free'. Hope to replace them with TFT screens once day so I can move back to my warm appartment again...

After having setup the network it is time to use the four screens with FS2002. To do this u can use software called WideView. It doesn't look like much at the moment in my setup but I know that the possibilities are unlimited.

Bought myselfs two new PC's to setup a network under XP. I need the second PC to power another two outside views. This way I should get three outside views (front and both sides 45 degrees) on three monitors. This gives a nice look around feeling. It is also a must when using the sim for flight training purposes because you need a view on the runway when your are flying downwind for example.

On route to building a Cessna 172 flight simulator I started playing arround with my new graphics card which can handle two screens. Ofcourse undocking the instrument panel was the first exciting thing to try out. It already makes a huge difference to have one large screen for outer view only.