The perfect recipe for a flight simulator?
Take a bunch of laser cut panels, a couple of well made plastic instruments and a whole heap of badly cut MDF and what does it make??? without careful planning... not a great deal actually. This is what I have found out over the now almost 6 plus years since I started dabbling in 'simpit' building. Quite frankly launching head first into constructing a complex homebuilt flight simulator is a recipe for disaster! If anybody starting out wants some advice before making their first project, it could be summed up in just three simple words! PLAN, MONEY and TIME! I am certain this is echoed all over the forums at Mycockpit.org and flightdecksolutions.com and not just by myself. Overlook all three and you could have a bit of a mess on your hands and it's the first one that has caused me the most pain, that I simply could have avoided if I had been more thoughtful. I managed to jump head first into making my first 'simpit' without doing enough planning and design work. Constructed out of 4mm laser cut aluminum panels and using Simkit's instruments, I still managed to make a respectable rendition (In my eyes at least) of a Cessna 172 cockpit. But it's when I started getting deeper into the project that things began to go wrong. Cutting my own MDF was a great, cheap alternative, but it was very time consuming and with my poor jigsawing, it led to some rather poor results that I wasn't particularly proud of. I left some of the complex parts like the yoke and throttle till later in the building process and came woefully unstuck. I believed that I could simply add it when I was further along... boy was I wrong on that one. So... this time around, and trust me, starting again hasn't been an easy decision, I am going to spend more time
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