Well, I didn't get as much done as I wanted to since my last update, but more than I thought I would...  Tis' the season for giving and for the past several days I've given my time to all sorts of non flight sim stuff so a lot has been accomplished elsewhere but not here.

I did get my control linkage hardware ordered for the yoke.  All but a couple gears have come in and they should be here next week.  I have the design for the aileron linkage done and have started to test fit the installation.  I'm 90% of the way there on the elevator linkage design but still have a few details left to work out.  I also picked up some 8" mini gas shocks to take the place of the brake master cylinders and have started to modify them to accept the potentiometers.

For the throttle, prop, and mixture controls I managed to score a set on eBay that were in mint condition but had too many hours on them so they were replaced during an annual.  I thought about leaving the cables as is, routing them through the firewall and making the connections to the potentiometers out there, but given the space I'll need in that area in the future for the Force Feedback system I decided against that.  Instead as I had shown in an earlier blog entry I cut them down.

This past week I spent some time wandering the aisles of my local hardware store with them in hand looking for a the hardware needed to attach the potentiometers directly to them.  As it turns out rubber padded conduit clamps and some perf board did the trick.  The slide pots are mounted to the perf board and the conduit clamps attach the aircraft control to the board.  The L brackets were cut out of a spare scrap of sheet metal I had in my misc. project parts collection. I used some 1/8" shaft collars to attach the bracket to the stub of the control cables.

I'm going to pick up some 3 pin molex connectors so each control can be more easily installed or removed as needed.  I'm also looking for a piece of material to create a dust shield for the slide pots.  While the type of pots I used lend themselves "mechanically" to this application, they don't have the longest life cycle (about 100,000 operations) and dust is their worst enemy.  The really high use controls, Ailerons, Elevators, etc. will use plastic film rotary pots that are rated for 5,000,000 operations. 

I'm starting to build up another collection of sub assemblies that will need wiring, these controls, the brakes, the landing gear switch and lights, etc. so it may be time to take over the kitchen table for a weekend and setup my solder and wire work station and go to town on that.  After that I'm hoping to be ready to install the wire harness behind the instrument panel, with one small exception.

I'm still missing one connector that I haven't been able to source locally.  They are out of stock at Leo Bodnar's site and none of the other suppliers I've checked seem to have them.  It's a 3 pin 0.01" pitch female connector    

to connect to the Leo Bodnar BU0836A USB Encoder to my wire harness.  I'm not sure I want to try and wire those in behind the instrument panel so the wire harness install may have to wait until I get them.  I've tried a few different types of alternate connectors that were very close but none are a close enough match.  Leo's site says they'll have them back in stock in January so not too much longer to wait, I hope.  Until then plenty of other things to do . . .

To interface the rotary pots to the yoke I had to dust off some basic math to determine the needed gear ratios.  For the ailerons it was real simple, calculate the gear ratio needed to convert the 180 degrees of yoke rotation to about 340 degrees for the pot.  I opted to replace the Cessna linkage with a more basic one as I mentioned above to accomodate the future addition of a Force Feedback system.  The elevator control was a bit more complicated, but again nothing basic math could not solve for. 

In this case I opted to take advantage of the Cessna linkage.  It uses a rod and cam arrangement to move two opposing cables that would normally go back to the aircraft's elevator control surfaces at the rear of the plane.   The control cables were cut by the salvage yard, but far enough back that I have more than I need.  For this application it was a matter of converting the linear motion of the cable with about 3" of travel into rotary motion for the pot of again about 340 degrees.  This will be accomplished by linking both cable ends to a chain which will then drive a sprocket and gear arrangement.  All that's left to do is determine the best mounting location for the pillow block and it shouldn't take long to build that out.

Well that's about it for now.  Oh wait, I did get some upholstery fabric for the dash panel so I'll be trying to figure out how best to contour and install that by January when I hope to be ordering the new windshield.  Like the last couple weeks, the next couple are real busy with holiday activities so my pit building time will be limited but I'll be sure to post whatever progress I do make.

Don't forget the reason for the season!  And, be sure not to get caught up.in the commercialized insanity leading up to Christmas.