GA Twin - main cockpit finished

[Guest gasebah]

Hi Peter,Hi y'all,I (almost)finished the main cockpit( a lot of new ideas have already come to my mind) and as always allow myself to post some pics. Sure not comparable to the stuff from the high tech guys, but I am quite satisfied. :-)Alex

[Guest]

Very impressive

[Guest MikePowell]

Looks nice. Thanks for posting the pictures.Mikewww.mikesflightdeck.com

[Guest gasebah]

Oh Mike,thx fr the encouragement I would have done a lot better if I had your knowledge. I would love to have mechanical moving instruments. But now, that the only vendor of these has gone crazy....Alex

[PeterR 9]

Looks great, Alex. Yeah, one day maybe we'll be able to build some air-core instruments. That would be sweet!Peter http://bfu.avsim.net/sigpics/PeterR.gifBFU Forums Moderator[table border=2 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=1][tr][td][table border=0 cellpadding=8 cellspacing=0][tr][td bgcolor=#540000]http://bfu.avsim.net/sigpics/logo75t.gif[/td][td align="center" bgcolor=#FFFFF6]Bush Flying Unlimited"At home in the wild"Looking for adventure? Come join us! * [link:bfu.avsim.net|Web Site] * [link:www.cafepress.com/bfu,bfu2,bfu3,bfu4|BFU Store] * [link:bfu.avsim.net/join.htm]Join!][/td][/tr][/table][/td][/tr][/table

[Guest]

Hi ALex:Excellent work...I am in process of building King Air cockpit and I noticed your enclosure for the main instrument panel. It looks so smooth. How did you make it and what maetrials did you use ? I'd like to do the same if OK?Thanks...JB

[Guest gasebah]

Hi JB,the whole unit is made from glass fiber, and is covered with leather. What we did is we built a wooden model first to ensure that everything is ok, measurements are exact, everything s convinient to use etc. etc.. You can find the pics of the wodden model in an earlier post about twin GAs here in this forum. To explain the whole progress in English is quite hard for me as English is not my native language. So I'll try to explain the basics only. Basically you build a mold for the parts you wanna make from simple carton. After that you lay out the mold with glass mat. Than there is a substance that is basically the same as fibre glass but very fine, and is almost liquid...you apply it on the glass mat until it is soaked. After the whole parts has hardened and dried out you can grind it very easily. The big advantage over wood is that it is very easy to make curves, rounded edges... you get the picture. Additionally it is very light. Much lighter than wood. Having those rounded edges it is very easy to cover with leather. That would not be a good idea with wood as you would have to grind the wood like hell to get a very smooth and round surface, otherwise the lether would look terrible on those rough edges and transitions between different parts.I am very lucky as a colleague of mine who works in my department is a well educated plastic mold builder. He thought me all there is to know. Usually he develops our mobile phone consoles for cars. I wrote a tutorial in English how to do the car consoles. It is basically the same process, only that the mold is not made from carton as that would not be possible for mass production. If you like I can send you the tutorial when I am back in the office on Monday. If you build the mold from glass fiber itself, you could make like 50-60 cockpits in one go. I already thought about making a business out of it. 2 versions , on with a CHYoke cutout, one with a PFC Yoke cutout. You also will have predefined cutouts for a couple of GoFlight units. These would be prepared but covered with leather. If you wanna use the cutouts you simply slice up the leather, put in your GF unit,and ready to go.I could sell the whole upper unit for as litle as 150 US$ to the end user and still leave a reasonable margin for a wholeslaer and a dealer. You guys might wanna tell me what You think about that idea. Wold you pay 150 bucks for this? Compared to what one GF unit costs I think it is a bargain.C u,Alex

[Guest gasebah]

Pls excuse all those terrible typos that I only saw when I reread the post. Too late to edit it now.Alex