I tried the stick force on my current cougar setup. It is around 2,4kg and I found it pretty strong in a long dogfight. Therefore I can live with the 3,5 kg. So I am finishing the design and begin the super boring drafting.

In the meanwhile I wanna show some cool stuff I bought for this project on E-bay.
These are high quality industrial rotary viscous dampers. They are damping the rotational movements with the help of silicone oil. They provide +/- 40deg super smooth and !adjustable! damping for both axis. The street price of these gems is 580 USD/piece, so it was a bargain for 20USD each considering that they are brand new. I quickly bought 8 pieces:)


dampers by csaba.moharos, on Flickr

The design is finished. The drawings are also done. CNC and standard part quotations are coming next. I will see now, how much does it cost to dream

500€ would be my guestimate, but that's without the sensors and might depend on the metal used. [EDIT] That'd be 3800 NOK

Yep, I think your guess can be quite accurate. I hope the small, family style CNC workshop I have contact with will quote good prices.

The pedal design is coming now. I have some ideas. It is just bloody hard to stand up from the CAD program at work and sit down with the same thing at home:)

Me too. I rather launch a game, than fire up ProE Wildfire or AutoCAD. Although it does make it easier if you have inspiration and want to make something happen. What's your tool of trade?

I work with Inventor. It became close to an industrial standard over here thanks to Statoil.

Rgr. ProEngineer here, which wouldn't have been my choice and that's putting it mildly. But after 8 years you learn to live with the quirks.

I have never used ProE, but I haven`t heard about too many happy users either:)

Anyway, I think I found my CNC guy. He turned out to be a flyer as well, we used to fly from the same small airfield, and he is building his own autogiro now. So he is more than happy to help me:) He also offered some cool, aerospace grade 7075 Alu.

A small update for this as well.

This design is also ready for machining, but before that I had to make some adjustments.
I decided to turn the whole gimbal system up side down. So the center of the gimbal can be as close as possible to the mounting plate, while I can use longer springs, and higher mechanism. It is important to keep the center close to the plate, otherwise I can end up with a huuuuge opening on it:)
I installed longer springs, so I can have some more pretension on them. Just like on the pedals I decided to use a simple steel mounting plate. The opening will be covered with leather boot.

Machinging is starting in June:)


Stick2


Stick1

And the two babies together:)


pdl+stick1


pdl+stick2