Hello from Ohio

[phil73]

Just wanted to throw out a hello. My name is Phil and I work as an IT manager for a company outside Cleveland Ohio. I have been an IT manager for the last 6 years. Prior to that I did a 6 year stint as a design engineer for a manufacturer of heavy duty truck parts and a year as a designer of industrial HVAC/Dust collection systems.

I'm new to the cockpit building hobby and have been working on some design ideas for a while now. I consider myself a jack of all trades and a master of none. So with that said, I plan to hand build all of my panels and wire everything by hand. I have a pretty large supply of scrap plexiglass/acrylic, so I plan to use a lot of acrylic for panel faces and buttons.

I plan to do a full A320 cockpit with some modifications to personalize it. I Instead of a joystick, probably going to do a yolk. Figure that will be more fun for my kids to be able to play around with. I'm not sure what I'm going to do for displays, but have thought about doing a projector for the front view and some small displays for some of the gauges and such. I have a pretty big supply of old CRTs if I need them.

Some of the things that I have thought about including are buttons and switches for as much as I can. Hand built controls including yolk, throttle quad, and pedals. I want to be able to incorporate 7 segment displays and lcd panels for things such as the autopilot, nav and radio. The enclosure is going to be realistic interior but the exterior is not really important to me since you probably won’t be able to see it anyways. I have some space issues, so I think I may have to downsize it a little, maybe 75-80% scale.

Currently I’m working on drawings of the enclosure, panels and controls. I’ll post some examples when I get them finished. I’m looking forward to getting to work on this and will post as I make progress.

Phil

[Michael Carter]

Welcome to the site Phil. Any questions, just throw them out.