Hello SimHQ! I'm Renic, and I'm new around these parts. I've been lurking this and other forums for quite a while, gathering intel and drooling over all of your amazing creations. I've built two "pits" before, but they were junk compared to the things I've seen here. So I'm stepping up my game and I'm going to try and make something worthy.

First, some history. This was my first pit, Moya. She was basically a big closet.



She was big, heavy, and immobile. I had grand plans for her, but I failed her in the planning stages. I came up with a "gooder enough" design after settling on PVC pipe and 1/8" ply for the frame and skin.



I used about 90' of 1" PVC pipe, six 4'x8' sheets of 1/8" ply, and scrap 3/4" ply that was lying around my garage. Made the seat from an old desk chair, more scrap 3/4" ply, and more PVC. The chair's arm rests were able to raise out of the way of the door.

Here's an internal view after she was "completed":



I stopped work on her after I realized that my design was sorely lacking. I had no space for panels of any type, the seat was just plain wrong and uncomfortable, and she was just too big overall. So I went back to the drawing board. I came up with a new design that was basically Moya 2.0. I deconstructed Moya and out of her burning remains was born Aurora.



I fixed the weight/mobility issue and had spots where I could put some panels, but the seat and comfort issues were still there.

So instead of heading right back to the drawing board, I slept on it for a few months. Mostly because I was unemployed at the time and had no funding, lol.

My goals for a pit are varied:
While I would love to build a replica pit, I want it to be generic. I don't have one specific sim that I fly, and I fly a lot of space sims as well, so something generic works well for me. Originally I wanted a pit that could double as an everyday workstation for computing, hence using an old desk chair for the seat. Now that I have a dedicated workstation, that idea is thrown out the window.
I also want the pit to be enclosed. I don't have the resources to be able to get awesome multi-displays or projectors, so if I can close myself off while I'm flying in my garage, my immersion will be less broken. Also, I want to be able to mount a panel above the seat, to get that futuristic "Millenium Falcon" feel of throwing switches and mashing buttons above my head.

Once I stumbled upon the amazing Akers-Barnes Cockpit designs, I decided that I would use that as a base, and build an enclosure around it. I started off by modeling every part in the plans in Google SketchUp.



Then I assembled the parts to complete the model in SketchUp.



Then I made very rough models of my HOTAS and threw them on the model along with an approximate size monitor and seemingly accurate models of Thrustmaster's MFDs.



Today I made an approximation of the shape that I want to achieve for the enclosure. It's nowhere near final, and is just to get the feel for how it will possibly end up.



I went ahead and bought two sheets of good quality 1/2" ply, and I've started marking them up with the plans.



I feel that this pit is going to come out much better than my previous two attempts; one, due to the experience gained from my past projects; two, because I've chosen what seems to be a very good design to build upon; and three, because I'm taking my time and planning things much better.

Wish me luck, fellas!

Good luck! Can't wait to see more pics. What are you going to do for temperature control inside the pit?

EDIT: This is what I'm going to use to keep myself cool.





But really I'm going to use six of these:



120mm PC case fans. Probably going to use three for exhaust and three for intake. And they glow blue. I'm aiming for a sci-fi look.

And they'll be controlled by this:



A PC fan controller panel with adjustable controllers. It's meant to go in a 5.25" drive bay on the front of your computer's case, but I'm going to mount it in my console somewhere. The knobs also glow blue.

Hi,

I'd say it looks great. Pls keep us up to speed on the progress and include lots of pictures.

BTW, would it be possible to get a copy of your SketchUp file since I'm contemplating building
one of my own and I'm seriously unfamiliar with that software.

Best regards

//
HaJa

Yeah, totally. You can get both the completed and assembled model of the A/B Cockpit and the model of all the pieces laid out in the suggested groupings from my Google 3D Warehouse profile here.

And don't worry, I'm very eager to get this thing completed and flyable as soon as possible, and I'll be taking plenty of pics!

Nice work Renic, wish I could make drawings like that in SketchUp. Please keep us informed

Very nice work and a very big thank you for the plans.
I so need to learn sketch-up for my build. Much better to
visualise and mock-up in the computer than RL.

Thanks, guys! But I can't take credit for anything except doing the modeling. The plans are completely the design of Peter Akers and Michael Barnes, over at the 62nd Fighting Falcons.

And making models in SketchUp isn't all that difficult. While I've screwed around with it in the past, this was the first time that I've ever actually created something in it. Google has a series of basic tutorial videos that really helped me out when I was just getting started.

Here's a question to you all: Center or side-stick?

My design isn't final, and I've yet to decide on whether I'm going to go center or side. Are there advantages or disadvantages to either? I've never used center stick, only side.

That is awesome dude, I love the cooler also.

If you can swing it, create options for both.

If you are definitely going to lock in on just one... it sounds like you may be better off with the side stick. A sidestick mount should fit well with your sci-fi emphasis, and will be easier to implement with an Akers-Barnes style pit. Plus, the Saitek X-52 (if you are going to keep using that) is easier to use in the side mount position. To center mount it, you have to deal with the issues that arise from the width of its base. That typically entails either making a narrow post platform that raises it above the movement area of the thighs (which may not be ideal for ergonomic operation of the stick), or extending the joystick's shaft to allow the stick base to be mounted below the movement area of the thighs. Stick extensions can be done, but introduce new challenges (distance of full stick deflection, spring power, additional leverage-based wear and tear on the stick's mechanism in the base, etc.) Also, a center mounted stick's ergonomics work best if you can angle the grip approximately 15 degrees counter-clock-wise. If you make a shaft extension, then that can be built-in to that. If you go with the raised platform, then you still have the stick angle issue.

Side stick mounting has it's own challenges though... (remember, the F-16's side stick doesn't have a large deflection like your Saitek X-52 does.) The bio-mechanics of that additional movement needs to be taken into account. Allow for enough clearance, and experiment with what elevation works best (of the stick relative to your seated position).

Someone needs to show this to Magnum!

Thanks for the input, CyBerkut! I know that I'm going to upgrade my stick at some point, either to a Thrustmaster Warthog or to a Saitek X65-F. I love the look and reviews for the Warthog, but I also love the force-sensing and price point of the X65. Hopefully I'll be able to upgrade sooner rather than later, but I'll probably be upgrading my PC before I get a new stick. I'm probably going to go side-stick though, and if I do, I'm assuming that the X65 would be better for that.

Hit a small snag on the build today. Was pretty much ready to cut, and was looking at all the lines, and some of them didn't look quite right. It concerned me enough that I went to Home Depot and bought a T-Square. Turns out my eye was right. A lot of my lines, while straight and square to each other, were not square with the edge of the plywood. So I'm in the process of checking all my lines and measurements, since I already found once piece that I had made half an inch shorter on one side!

In most of my previous projects I just "eyeballed" it, and things turned out "gooder enough," but with this build I want things to be straight and level and accurate. I never really found it helpful before now, but I'm glad I'm following the old addage "measure twice, cut once!"

Interestingly enough the plans for the Akers pit should have come with CNC files. Don't know if you wanted to go the route of finding someone that can cut the plywood for you.

Great looking plans Renic! I absolutely agree with your measure twice and cut once philosophy. I have a well equipped garage shop to work from but all the tools in the world won't fix a miscut board! I have some scrap MDF in my garage from that exact issue.

Are you going to power the fans off of your PC power supply or run them to a stand alone power source?

Dud

I haven't decided on the fan's power yet. The power supply for the computer I'm going to build is pretty beefy, so I think it should be able to handle it without a problem. I originally planned on a 1000 watt supply, but since I'm not going to be running Crossfire or SLI, I've since downgraded it to a 750 watt supply. But none of the new PC parts are ordered yet, so there's still time to change my mind. Good point to bring up though, I'll have to do some more research before making the final decision. Thanks!

Lots of progress today!

First off, my MFDs came today!


Tested to see if they'll both fit on my 15" LCD that I'm planning on mounting behind the center panel.

They fit!

Started cutting the first sheet of plywood.


I figured that drilling a hole where the slots and notches need to be cut out would make life easier...


But they ended up punching through the last layer instead of cutting through.


My buddy came over to help and he suggested putting a scrap piece of wood under the piece to be drilled through, and that worked wonderfully.

Got the first two pieces cut out.


And finished the entire first sheet of plywood!


Here's whats left over.


Cut everything with my cheap $50 Ryobi Jigsaw.

Now we're going to start the second sheet of plywood. It's a good night to be a pit-builder!

Woo! Got everything cut and assembled! Pictures:











The pics are a bit blurry and shaky, but you try taking clear pictures after running a jigsaw for hours!

There are a few pieces that need to be trimmed a bit in one area or another (you'll notice that I don't have the keyboard tray inserted, and that's why). And I didn't cut the hole for the seat support pipe, so no sitting in it yet!

But overall, I think it turned out pretty good!

When you're drilling a big hole like that, it's best to drill a small pilot hole, bore 1/2 depth from one side and then flip it over and finish the hole. This is important when you're using a hole saw. You can do the same thing with a forstner bit, but you bore 1/4 depth first instead of 1/2. That keeps the center spike of the bit from widening your pilot hole and messing with the bit center.

g.

Awesome, thanks for the tip! I'm pretty new at all this woodworking business!

Gene, thanks for the tip again. I used it when I drilled the holes for the seat support bar, and they came out so much better than my previous holes!

Now I can sit in my cockpit!



Made more progress today. I mounted a 15" Dell monitor behind the center console!

Fist I "shelled" the monitor of it's plastic casing.





Then I bent out a few tabs on the metal carriage that were non-structural and drilled holes in them to use as mounting points.



I then traced the monitor on the center console piece and cut out the hole.



I then traced the monitor on a piece of 1/8" plywood and added a 1/2" margin around the edge. The I placed my MFDs where they should go and traced and cut the inner hole.

I didn't take any pics until the thing had been fully mounted, being so caught up in the process.

Here's the modification of the desk portion that I made to accommodate the bulge of the monitor's back.



And here it is mounted, in all it's glory!



For the time being, I'll be mounting the MFDs using Velcro. I haven't thought of a better mounting scheme yet that won't scratch or damage the monitor.

I suppose that it would also be possible to cut holes in the top portion of the facade for gauges and whatnot, but I don't yet have the ability to cut holes that large.

Hi Renic,

Nice work on the pit. Keep up the good work.

If you want nice clean holes, get yourself one of these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0001K9UFU/re...ASIN=B0001K9UFU

Cut halfway through from one side and then finish from the other. Best used in a pillar drill, but I have used it in a hand drill. Gives holes from about 40mm to 120mm diameter.

Cheers,

Andy

For thin materials there's also hole cutters that essentially work as a caliper with an xacto knife blade at one end. Also, if you want a more permanent mount that can still be taken apart easily, try a hot glue gun. If the surface is too porous and the glue attaches to it too permanently you can attach some sticky tape on it beforehand. Nice work on that monitor mount, btw.

That design was my very first pit. I ended up widening it and sticking an office chair in it. Nice clean cuts though. I'd put more lights in your workroom though or you might lose a finger in the dark cutting the wood. Looks good though and I like the roof top enclosed idea with that!

Thanks! Yeah, I've got two big overhead shop lights that are nice and bright, but a rat got in the wall and chewed through a wire, killing power to the lights and half the garage. But hey, my jigsaw has a light, that's good enough! Lol. But my buddy nearly lost a finger when he was helping me, he was holding down the wood in a bad place and I was so concentrated ong getting a straight cut that I would have ran my jigsaw right through his finger if he hadn't realized his mistake in time!

This pic may very well haunt you forever now that it is on the interwebs

Bahahaha! I hope not! I don't know who'd save a pic of a nerd sitting in some plywood.

Small update:

Got my MFDs mounted and working as in-game MFCDs in DCS A-10C. It was quite a hassle trying to figure out how to get it working and getting the displays positioned right since the entire time that I was working on it the official forums where all the nifty how-to's are posted were down! But after a lot of trial and error and pulling my hair out I got it all working right!





You'll notice in the second pic my $20 Logitech Webcam C210. I got it set up and working with FaceTrackNoIR and DCS Warthog, and frankly, I'm quite pleased and surprised at the speed and quality of the head tracking with only $20 invested! The one problem I've run into so far is that when I move the angle of my head downward, as if to look at my lap, the camera moves vertically downward slightly, but not angularly downward. This means that I have a really hard time trying to see the controls in the cockpit. I'm not too worried about it, as once my simpit gets it's enclosure I'm going to switch to TrackIR due to the lack of light in the enclosure. But if anyone has an idea or solution for the time being, that would be swell!

Also, as detailed in my other post here , I purchased a Logitech G940 from Amazon, used it for a few hours, was thoroughly unimpressed, and sent it back. My biggest issue with it was that it showed up as three different controllers in Windows. For most modern sims and games, that's not a problem. But with my favorite genre being space flight sims and the fact that there are really no modern ones this means that the G940 is mostly useless for me. Very few of the games that I want to play allow multiple controllers.

In that thread Sokol1 pointed out that any HOTAS except for CH Products' would also encounter this problem once pedals were introduced. This stopped me in my tracks. I sat there with my reply window open for about an hour, just thinking about this issue. I came up with a solution based off of the solution I made for the joystick users of the game Black Prophecy. For those not in the know, Black Prophecy is a combat space sim MMO that was designed for either joystick and throttle or mouse and keyboard. One of the things you can spend talent points on when gaining levels is automatic advanced flight maneuvers called Tactics. Examples are quick and tight rolls, flips, stops, and boosts. In order to activate the tactics, a series of directional inputs needs to be used, such as Strafe Left, Strafe Right, Strafe Right to activate a right barrel roll, or Forward, Forward to activate a boost. With the keyboard, this was easy enough, since the flight controls are setup with WASD like a FPS game. But even when using profiling software to create a macro that should activate the tactics, it would never, ever work for joystick users and no one in the community could figure out why.

I eventually discovered that the problem was that in order to activate the tactics, the game was expecting a small period of no input between directional commands. If you're trying to use boost as a macro of "W, W" while your throttle is at full, the game never sees the accelerate command drop to zero and the tactic won't activate. I just knew that there had to be a way around this. So by using the combination of the programs PPJoy and GlovePIE, I assigned the physical throttle axis to a virtual axis, bound the virtual axis to the accelerate command, and created a script so that when a button on the throttle was pressed, the virtual axis was set to neutral, the "W" key was activated twice rapidly, and the axis was set back to full. It was a long and convoluted workaround, but by gum, it worked!

Sorry for the long tangent, now back to something that people might actually care about, lol!

By using a similar method to the one detailed above, multiple controllers can be assigned as a single controller in older games, thus getting around the limitation in older games and sims.

Copypasta from my other thread:


tl;dr: I'm working on a method to make multiple controllers show up as one in older games and sims.

Small update:

I bit the bullet so hard that I now have lead fillings and ordered myself a TM Warthog! I want the Warthog to be center-stick, so I started working on a "slot-in" style center stick mount mod for my ABC.
I'm working on rough guesstimations with the Warthog's pedestal dimensions, but here's a preview of my first draft:



The piece will slot into part "I", the front seat support. It extends just a hair farther than the seat does, and raises about level with the seat itself. On top of it, mounted to the cross-supports with L-brackets will be a piece of 1/2" ply that the Warthog stick will mount to. This would enable the stick to be removed and set aside, but I can't think of a reason I'd need to. I suppose that I could mod the right portion of the seat to accept the mount so I could switch between center-stick and side-stick if I wanted. Hrm. I can see the benefits of that. Maybe I'll look into it.

I also created a template for my MFD screen in Photoshop so that I can make it look like the screen does something in games that don't support exporting parts of the cockpit. Here's a shot of it displaying my MFD keybinds for Black Prophecy:

Renic, Great work!

It looks like you intend to keep the flat plate base on the Warthog stick. Wouldn't it be preferable to remove that plate, and just mount the cylindrical part that contains the joystick's working parts? It would give your legs more clearance. When you're going this far with it all, it seems a shame to compromise on that. There are some great ideas shown in some other threads on here.

Oh no, I am getting rid of the plate. You'll notice that the measurements in my image are not large enough to hold the plate. I'm intending on having the Warthog mounted to a piece of 1/2" ply which is attached to the cross supports. I need to do more tweaking of my model in SketchUp now that I have real-world dimensions.

Here is the third revision of my Center-Stick mod for my cockpit. The pedestal of the Warthog mounts to the circular piece of wood which is mounted to the two pieces below it. That slides into two pieces that are slotted into Part "I", the front seat support which will be modified to accommodate. The whole thing slots together and is right with the feel of the original ABC.

It would most likely be possible to create something similar for the right block of the seat since the front seat support also supports the left and right "wings", and lines up almost perfectly with where I like to have my stick when I fly side-stick. Then I could do both side and center in one pit!

Another update:

I finished the design for my center stick mod for my cockpit and traced it out onto 1/2" ply, but I kept putting off cutting it. To keep myself entertained in the meantime, I bought myself a flight suit.



Hello ladies.

It's black, non-military issue, and not made of nomex. It serves to enhance my sense of immersion, and makes me feel cool after a couple of beers.

That's an A-10 pin on the lapel. Picked it up for $4 at the military surplus store where I got my suit.

I've been playing a bit of Black Prophecy again, and I've been using the Coolie Switch on the Warthog's throttle to control horizontal and vertical strafing. The switch was starting to hurt my finger so I dug out my mechanic's gloves to wear while flying. This is what happened after a few hours of flight:



I need to find somewhere to get some real, durable flight gloves. I found an online shop here, but I'm not sure if they're still in business.

But tonight, I finally got on the ball and finished the center stick mod. Here it is fully cut and assembled, minus the mounting circle for the stick:





I test fit it in my cockpit, and it fits EXACTLY as it does in my SketchUp model.


And then I made the mount for the stick itself.


It feels great so far, but I haven't had the chance to test it in-flight yet. I think I'll go do that now!

I'm glad the hole cuts worked out. I saw that ragged tear-out on your first ones and wanted to send a condolence letter to the plywood manufacturer.

So how many times have you been caught making machine gun noises?

g.

Awesome work Renic!

Thanks guys! Caught? Never. Made the noises? All the time.

Some of the cuts are pretty ugly due to me being impatient, using a dull blade, and also having a few beers in my system at the time, lol.

The height is almost perfect for me, it could stand to be just a hair taller, but as it is now, it doesn't get in the way of my legs, and they don't get in the way of it.

I've noticed a slight left and right pitch in the stand, but I haven't noticed a difference in-flight. It's pretty good so far.

My TrackIR 5 came in the mail yesterday, a whole day earlier than they said it would. I had a few hiccups when getting everything configured, as all my controls in DCS A-10C got changed around somehow. I fixed everything, but I still don't know how they got messed up in the first place.

But that TIR sure enhances the experience. Flying around before I got everything set up right again, I found a train track, and followed it low and fast up into the mountains, where I was so surprised to see an actual train rolling along it that I promptly crashed into it. And that crashed DCS, LOL.

Just now I finally had the time to sit down for an extended period of time and learn to use the weapons systems in the A-10. I'm happy to report that I finally got my first kill! Killed four trucks, a few buildings, a bridge and a SAM site. I probably should have used a maverick instead of the GBU-12 on the SAM though, as he got a hit on me before my bomb impacted. I haven't learned the countermeasures yet! But I celebrated with a PB&J, a corn dog, two cookies and some fruit punch lemonade.

Now I gotta figure some temporary solution to keep my pedals from sliding away from me in flight!

Depends on whether you have carpet or bare floors.
For carpet you could use short carpet spikes either attached to the pedals or attach the pedals to a thin piece of wood and attach the spikes to that.

For bare floors I have heard of using carpet scraps or carpet pad scraps under furniture to prevent it from sliding. Turn the carpet carpet side down so as not to damage floors that you don't want to scratch. If you go the carpet pad route and you have hardwood floors they make a pad specifically for HW floors.

Hope this helps.

Thanks, Allaire. Eventually the whole pit will be mounted on a movable surface, probably 3/4" ply with locking casters, and the floorboard area will be carpeted. Then I can just throw some velcro hook on the bottom of the pedals and problem solved.

Right now the pit is on the concrete floor of my garage. For a quick fix to make it flyable, I grabbed a scrap piece of 1/2" ply and laid it flat on the ground behind the pedals and butted my PC case up against it to keep them from sliding back. It works for now, but is obviously far from anything but a temporary solution.

As in left and right play in the unit? Possibly some wood glue to fix it?

Awesome work by the way, a very smart design.

So what's next?

Thanks! Yeah, the base wobbles left and right a bit when I move the stick. I'll probably end up adding some extra supports extending from the sides of the seat walls to wedge it in real tight. But that won't come until I'm ready to paint and permanently secure all the parts to each other, and that's a ways down the road.

As for whats next, I've been too busy flying Warthogs to really think about it. I got my TrackIR5 on Monday, and just having it has made my sim time so much more enjoyable. I finally tried out one of the missions in DCS A-10C instead of just putzing around in the hills aimlessly shooting at things. I posted the results of that mission in a thread here.

I also got the itch to customize my hog with a skin, my first try I posted here.

I settled on a callsign and I ordered myself a custom flight suit nametag from here. I'm hoping that it will arrive soon.

As for actual progress on Gungnir, I've been rethinking my idea of a full enclosure. As much as I want her to be fully enclosed, I cannot for the life of me come up with a design that I like and also works well in the real world. I can make a full enclosure work, but it'll be ugly as sin, and that is something I want to avoid. I've been thinking that I'm probably going to have to figure a way to skin the pit so that both the seat and desk appear to be one unit. Regardless of the situation with the enclosure, I am planning on adding raised facades to the left and right arms of Gungnir's seat so that they appear to be flush with the top of the inner walls of the chair, and to allow switches to be added more easily. But the final design of the facades depends on the status of the enclosure, so that's also a ways down the line.

I have four tasks that I could get started on right away though, I've just been putting them off. I need to sand all my pieces, I need to prime and paint, I need to make seat cushions, and I need to make an angled riser for my pedals. A distant fifth task I could start is to create a custom switch panel or two on the center console with my IPac that's been gathering dust since I abandoned Aurora.

The cushions will probably come first, followed by the riser, then sanding, and finally paint.

I had some free time today before work due to insomnia, so I picked up some sandpaper and grey primer and got to work. Dismanteled the seat, sanded most of it (the important parts that will show), laid the parts out on some newspaper, and went to town with three cans of spray primer.

Fully coated everything that is going to show, and half-assed the areas that are hidden. Got both sides coated before I had to leave for work. Hopefully by the time I get home everything will be dried so I can put the seat back together.

Gonna need to go back to home depot to get more primer for the console, but that won't happen till Monday or Tuesday due to messed up scheduling at work.

Pics or your lieing.

Haha, here you go. Was too tired to take pics during the process.

Nice, looking good!

Two updates:

First, I finally got Gungnir's console painted.





Second, I got my new videocard from UPS today.



Sapphire Radeon 6870. It's replacing my Sapphire Radeon 4870. I haven't tried out any games with it yet and it's only been installed in my system for about 30 minutes, but already I love it. I'm finally able to use HDMI on my monitor again! My monitor came with a DVI-HDMI cable that got damaged when I moved my setup from the master bedroom to my workshop in the garage about a year ago, so I had to go with a DVI-VGA adapter since my monitor only supports VGA and HDMI. There was a very noticeable downgrade in visual fidelity when I had to do that, and I've been sad ever since.

I was worried that I had actually damaged the HDMI port on the monitor, but was really hoping it was just the cable, and thank goodness it was!

Time to go push this thing to the max!

What is up, SimHQ!? Renic here, and I am back after almost six months of non-activity. A lot has happened in my personal life which prevented me from advancing my build any further. First off, during the winter months my work is traditionally exceptionally slow, so many shifts were canceled each week, which caused a severe decline in my income, which meant that I could not afford to complete any new work on my simpit. In addition, my meager expendable income was spent trying to maintain a new intimate relationship which was doomed from the start, and which ended recently.

But with my work picking back up and my relationship ended, I finally have the time and resources to pick up on my passion once again: pit building!

I haven't done any work on my pit since November, and even after reorganizing my workshop to accommodate a much easier use of my computer as both a daily workstation and flight sim, my pit has only been used a few times each month. It saddens me that Gungnir, my most recent labor of love, has mostly just been collecting dust. But with my new found free time and expendable income, I fully plan on advancing my simpit further.

My first order of business (after dusting) is to finally finalize the seat of my simpit. Anyone with experience padding the seat of an ABC, I welcome their advice and anecdotes. After that, the distance between seat and desk will be finalized, and then permanently affixed to a base "floor", which will then be set upon locking casters to assist with mobility of the pit.

Again, I ask for any advice and encouragement from anyone who has been in my position.

No offense to you Renic, but I do not see the point of building an ABC-pit then mounting it on a permanent manner. The aim of the ABC was to have an easily-transportable pit, but if you were not packing it up every other week for LAN parties, you could add a few more to the design to make it much, much better. Or was it just because the plans for the ABC were readily available?

As for the seat cushions, I read that those making replica ACES cockpits have had good success with using excercise/yoga mats as padding. Basically cut 3-4 layers on the shape you want, find a way to encase it in something that resembles a cover, and viola!

However, chair comfort has always been a problem of mine. I've tried countless office chairs that had a within-reason price tag but most failed within a year or so. Then I thought about car seats --- people sit on them for hours and hours and hours at a time and do not have problems with the seat cushion. They'll have problems with being seated for some time, yes, but no sore parts due to poor cushions. So I got me a decent set of bucket seats and designed my pit around the seat! A long 4-5 hour DCS A10 session is not problem, and I spring out of my chair afterwards with no sore back or joints!

I recycled my seat cushions from my ABC pit from years ago, but IIRC I used 3 inch thick foam from a fabric store, with one piece cut for the seat and another for the back. I used double thickness for the headrest. The seat is covered with a camo carseat cover with the head part cut away as it didn't wrap properly around the headrest. I then covered the headrest with my old od green laundry bag from boot camp.

And those are much the same reasons I've decided to use a bucket car seat in my pit build. Plus, a comfy office chair will run you around $100 and up. A decent bucket seat from the junk yard will cost you about $30 to $50.

My use of the ABC plans is because of their availability and ease of creation, Ice. They served as a jumping-off point for me, and as my previous two pits had very little woodworking in them, I figured this was a good place to start learning about the process. I've already altered the design a little with my additions of the monitor behind the console and the center stick mount, and I plan to keep modifying it.

A few months back I went to the local fabric store and tried out every type of foam padding they had. By "tried out" I mean I threw it on the floor and plopped my butt down on it. None of the different types or thicknesses seemed to be padded enough, and the only one that came close would have been much too thick for the seat if I doubled up on it. I have lost about 20 lbs. since then, so maybe they'd feel better now?

I went looking around the local big box and sporting goods stores today, in search of mats. All the yoga and exercise style mats are way too expensive for what they are, so I went looking for those blue foam camping bedroll mats like I used to use when I was a kid in the Boy Scouts. I found some new-fangled advanced mats that were much too expensive and didn't provide the kind of support that I expected, and that was it.

I think what I'm going to end up doing is creating cushions the way that I did for the armrest of my first pit. I have a few old couch cushions that can be sacrificed and cut up.

Another question I have is regarding panels. I have an IPac controller board, traditionally used by the MAME community to make custom arcade joysticks, and I'll be using it for one of my panels. I have a total of 32 inputs from it, and I'm not sure which controls I should focus on first. Any suggestions?

Just as I thought... and I'm not blaming you. However, you had a look at my cockpit, yes? Would you believe that I got maybe about 95% of the cutting done for me at the shop where I got the wood? They charged me £4 for all the cuts, sure, but all I was left to do was cut the support blocks (I do MDF-to-block-to-MDF connections, I don't screw MDF-to-MDF if I can help it) and a few angle cuts for the left and right aux panel and aux panel supports. You did more cutting with the ABC's slots than I did with my pit!

Regarding cushions, what I read was any old yoga mat, so maybe you can score one from a friend who is "upgrading" or maybe try eBay to get it cheaper? Like I said, a couple of layes (one guy said three), wrap them in cloth, and give it a try. The idea here is to find a material that does not "bottom out," but as you have discovered it is difficult to find one. You either end up with a thin layer of padding that eventually gives way or a thicker layer of padding that unfortunately pushes you too far up-and-forward. Hence my resort to a car seat. However, a car seat is wider than an ACES seat by at least a few inches, a bucket seat is even slightly wider, so you will have to make allowances for this if you decide to go this route.

As for panels, well, I've not delved into that myself as well, that is all black magic voodoo to me But I plan on building the F-16's left aux panel soon, as soon as funds free up. From what I've read though, different controllers interface with the PC differently, and sometimes interface with the sim itself differently as well --- I've had numerous warnings of making sure XXXX controller board works with YYYY simulation before buying it.

Hope that helps, and looking forward to see what you do with your pit build!

Depends on what you fly.

My first set of controls I build will be a trim and flap control set. But I fly IL-2 1946 (WWII Prop) and those are the controls I am missing the most right now.

Think about what you fly, and your HOTAS setup and consider what controls you go to the keyboard on the most for. Those controls that you don't currently have that you would use the most.