Building Your Sidestick Area

When Steve and I sat down and looked over all of our options with regards to flightdecks we chose the Airbus for its simplicity. Simplicity in this case means a more obtainable result. No sense building a Boeing and trying to use a joystick! (Contact Kevin Saker if you want a slick looking Boeing Yoke!).

The plan with this Airbus sidestick is to attach it to a good quality computer joystick assembly. One of the areas that we are going to focus on is the "Feel" of the joystick. I have asked Ron to look into obtaining an apparatus which is designed to stiffen up the feel of the joystick to have it resemble the A320. A "Clevice" type device is mounted on the shaft of the above unit and with its spring assembly achieves that goal. That covers the sidestick itself.

The sidestick area of the sim plays a very key role in the overall construction. In the "Building Your Center Pedestal" article we discussed the concept of the pedestal being the base for the entire sim. The Sidestick area plays a similar role in that we need to create a "Shelf" that extends from behind the Center Instrument Panel (ECAM displays) across to the sidestick area. This is where we have to mount the 17" monitors. This shelf unit will require a great deal of stengthening to support the weight of a monitor. We really have few options in this area as we need to snug the monitor up tight to the Instrument Panel. In order to hide the shelf we will construct a fake "Pull Out Shelf" unit

We will be using 3/4" Medium Density Fibreboard (MDF) for this area (Available at Home Depot). Covering this assembly will be done with a combination of laminate and vinyl. Vinyl for the top section which is dark blue and the laminate for the visible vertical parts. Well, this wraps up the assembly approach we will take when delve into this area. Truly hope this assists you in your construction.

PC