Friday, November 16, 2007

Reverse gear


Full reverse please....

This little board is responsible for good landings on short runways. It's the interface between the throttles, the reverser switches and the Simkits I/O adapter.

The problem was that real Connie thrust reverser don't work in the way it is needed for the flight simulator. If you pull the levers in the real airplane, then the propellers go into reverse pitch and the engine power is increased to approx. 30%. That means the propellers blow backwards and the throttles open up the more you pull the lever.

If you connect that directly to the flightsim you will get a problem. The simulator doesn't know if he has to reverse or accelerate, a movement of the throttles disables the reverse mode. The result is a wild switching between forward and reverse thrust if both commands are given simultaneously.

This little relais board does something simple. It disconnects the throttle potentiometers as soon the reverser switch is activated and the movement of the levers has no effect anymore. If you pull the levers, you will get that amount of reverse power as programmed in the flightsim.

Many thanks to the guys at mycockpit.org for helping me to solve this problem.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Fake panels


Old and new faceplate...

The old faceplate from the ignition switch was a 'little bit' corroded. So I made a new one as described in the last post.

But how do you 'make' such a faceplate or label??? It's easy... really. If you have drawn a new plate on your computer (that's the difficult part), then print it on self adhesive paper with a good printer. If you need color, take a color printer.
To protect the paper and the printing on it, you only need some self adhesive transparent plastic sheet. Cut the label with the plastic on it into the right size.... that's it!

Sounds easy and with a little practice it really is.

Fonts needed


Another panel is functional...

Today I finished the work on the pilots overhead panel. From the many switches on that panel I will use only the engine ignition switches and maybe the command bell and the "no smoking" and "fasten seatbelts" switches... I only have to find a nice sounding bell.

The faceplate underneath the ignition switches was completely corroded and I had to replace it. I did it the easy way...
I scanned the original plate and used the picture as a background in Adobe Illustrator. Then I used that program to draw a new plate over the original picture. That way I was sure to have the correct dimensions and locations for the holes and letters.

The biggest problem was to find the right font for the words. I found that Copperplate Bold was very close. The only difference was that Copperplate had some little "spikes" on it's letters. But by chance I found a solution to get rid of the spikes. In Illustrator it is possible to define areas and borderlines of objects freely, also for letters. I used a thin borderline in the same color as the background and that line made the spikes invisible. Result... a perfect Super Connie panel font!