Some good ideas above. Makes me think of Propnut's "Rollout Simpit", and excellent design that may give some inspiration here:
Rollout Simpit

The platform he mounted these to seems quite different from your plans but his design, once locked in, seems like it would be rock-solid to me.
Derek

Those are indeed very nice, and I thought about something similar, but they wouldn't lower my HOTAS much more than my current setup.



I was hoping to get them down so that the top of the Throttle and Stick base were about 6" below the top of the desk. Currently, and it appears from the pictures I looked at, the throttle and stick base top is level with the bottom of the desk top.

Ok, here is what I have so far, but after looking more at the rollout simpit, I may have to take a closer look. I really like the additional controls he implemented.



And for when I"m ready to fly:

I am skeptical about that rollout pit since he stores the joystick at an angle.... unless you're removing the heavy joystick from the base, I'm wary of having the joystick "hanging" to one side for extended periods.

My current setup has me sitting on a car seat, which is bolted onto a "floor," and everything else is bolted onto that "floor." I'm going overkill on "stability" here.

I started with that idea, as I need another chair anyway, currently I roll the office chair I use for work from my home office to the hobby room that is right next to it. But since I want to do race simming, flight simming, and general recreational gaming all from the same computer, I needed something that could fit all those needs and didn't confine me to a flight simpit all the time. So I started trying to come up with ideas that would be able to 'transform' to fit the 3 main functions I wanted the desk to meet. Flight Sim, Racing Sim, and general gaming/computer desk.

The nice thing about sketchup is I can design 3 different desks, and not spend a penny. Lets see what I come up with this time.

The problem with Sketchup is it is nice to design stuff in, but hard to get the "ergonomics" correct. I've designed my pit as much as I can on Sketchup, but still needed to make adjustments for myself and my height, reach, etc.

IMO it is better to design one pit and stick with it rather than trying to do a jack-of-all trades pit. Or easier to design a pit with little-to-no "office work" capability (ie not very comfy keyboard and mouse placement). That sliding keyboard tray is a very big pain to work in the design. It'll get in the way of your steering wheel when you race and it'll keep sliding back into the table when you fly.

Perhaps your right about the pit design, but I can't really afford to dedicate the kind of top end machine that would be required to run IL-2 CoD at max settings to just flight simming. The computer has to fit all those roles, my space is limited so I need to come up with some setup that will fill all those roles for me as well, those are just the constraints of the engineering problem. Your input is greatly appreciated though, as it helps me to recognize the problems with my design schemes.

The keyboard tray serves multiple purposes, one it holds the keyboard off the desktop(duh), two, it makes a nice 'prop' to set my CH MFP on front and center when I'm flying (I'll just push the keyboard back a bit. Figured I'd incorporate multiple slide bolts on the underside of the keyboard tray to lock it into the desired position. As for the keyboard tray getting in the way of the steering wheel, I've got it set to be just over 3" below the desktop. I think that would give ample clearance for the Logitech G27 Steering Wheel I"m looking to purchase to clamp to the desktop. If not, I could set up a piano hinge on the desktop so that part of it will fold back so that I can clamp the wheel to the keyboard tray; which I plan to build out of 3/4" plywood and a couple of keyboard tray rails I can get at Home Depot.

On the design you made, is there are reason they are angled and not square?

I have no idea why the guy made them that shape. I didn't design them but I have built them but before I built them I did a mockup in cardboard to see if they would look/feel like I wanted them. They work pretty well but I built them to take apart since I am adding in a couple of control panels. I will post pictures up in another thread when I get the first panel installed and the angle panel across the front for my MFD's. Also I made them with the angles because that fit in with the "theme" that I wanted which was part scifi/ww2/modern era jets look.

It only took me a few hours but I broke up the different cutting and fitting time into several weekends. If you really wanted to get moving you can build those inside of an hour each.