- 9,144
- United Kingdom
- neema_t
Hi guys,
I started building my cockpit yesterday so I thought I'd show you. It's the first I've ever made, the first time I've worked with aluminium profile and the first time I've ever used a mitre saw, so it's a bit ropey, but hopefully it'll have a couple of interesting features that haven't been done before.
So far the cost is at approximately £170 after VAT and delivery, excluding tools I bought for the job but will keep afterwards. A breakdown:
Seat (from a 1st gen Mazda MX-5): £20, though technically £40 for the pair.
Wood for the seat mount: £20. It's 1400mm of 45x75mm and 1400mm of 90x90mm.
Hardware for the seat mount: £10 (two M8x500mm threaded rods, bag of M8 nuts, bag of M8x25mm washers)
Flexlink XDBM 22x22mm aluminium profile beam, 2 metres at £6.20 per metre (I bought some to test it out).
10 more metres after I was satisfied with it: £60.10.
T-slot nuts for XDBM 5mm slot: one bag of 10 for £11.87 (extortionate!)
Bag of 100 M5x25mm socket head machine screws: £10.37.
(I got these all from RS Components)
Tools: Dremel with cut off wheels and sanding... thing, Wickes own-brand mitre saw (£60 or so) and pillar drill (£50ish). You also need a 5mm and 9mm drill bit, but as aluminium is so soft a wood drill bit will do if you're slow with the drilling.
The measurements for the cockpit are: 850mm wide, 600mm deep and 600mm high. My seat mount is 145mm tall, and I found for my size the wheel was perfect at 600mm up from the ground. The centre console section is a fairly large 300mm wide, this is to accommodate the shifter next to a home-made hydraulic style handbrake, which I haven't made yet. The part for the buttons and toggles will extend down from the top of the cockpit down to the diagonal beam section where the shifter is located and will be made of acrylic probably mounted on MDF, the reason I haven't got it mounted directly to a beam is so that I have some flexibility in the design.
In terms of building the thing, let's just say I wanted it to be a learning experience and I've definitely learnt a great deal... The main things being: You can't drill a hole from both sides of the seat mount and expect them to line up perfectly, don't buy Wickes own-brand power tools if you need accuracy and Flexlink beams are cheap (ish) but EVERYTHING else to fit said beams is incredibly expensive.
I don't know if anyone else is building a cockpit with this aluminium stuff, but let me give you some advice. If the beams aren't cut perfectly and the holes aren't drilled perfectly, they won't line up, which is common sense of course. However, that's not such a bad thing because a small amount of deflection in getting the beams to fit means there's no room for it to wobble, so you get a tighter fit with less play. BUT, if you want to cover the cockpit in acrylic panels like I intend to, you'll run into problems, because none of the sides will be perfectly straight.
I will probably replace every join with a 90 degree bracket for better accuracy, but as they're £3.60 each and each bracket requires two T-slot nuts which are almost £12 for a bag of ten, there's no way I'm doing them all at once because that's going to cost more than the aluminium itself, in fact that will probably cost twice as much as the aluminium in the end, which is ridiculous when you compare the amount of aluminium you're buying. I mean one tiny bracket is more than half the price of one whole metre of the stuff...
Anyway, as it stands, it's actually surprisingly rigid and incredibly light. I've yet to screw it to my seat mount, but hopefully when I do that I can straighten it out a little, because as it is it feels like the horizontal part isn't parallel to my chest which is not much good. I was using it last night and apart from the base moving around (as it will given the lack of weight, lack of friction and lack of support) it was a lot better than I was actually expecting when I was putting it together.
The next step, apart from replacing the joins in stages, is to design and build the electronics. This is where the cockpit will get interesting, I think, because there are a few small details i want to add that I don't think have been done before. I don't want to go into them now because if I start listing all the things I want to do and find out they're impractical, too expensive or just don't work then my reputation will be ruined, possibly even shattered, and then I'll probably cry or something. I will however tell you that there will be three main parts; a PS3 controller board (not a Cthulhu board because they don't have analogue inputs), a keyboard matrix and an ATmega328 microcontroller. In the future there may also be either a Leo Bodnar SLI-M or an iPod Touch running sin:speed, or maybe even some actual dials from an actual car, but that's going quite far ahead.
After the control electronics I'm going to start on tactile effects, probably just a single channel with one or two drivers (seat and pedals) to start with and then I'll see what happens after that. After I've gotten the frame straightened out sufficiently I'll cover it in acrylic to give it a shiny black SuperGT-ish look (the ARTA NSX cockpit was my inspiration for the shape of it, by the way) instead of the current industrial structural look, and then I'll probably move out and have to sell it at a huge loss.
So, yeah, it's at a very early but functional stage at the moment, I can't promise regular updates and I know it's ugly as sin right now but it'll improve slowly. I want to improve it in such a way that there are distinct stages and leave it in a useable state between each stage so I can take breaks from it to do other things, so maybe I'll just update with every stage that I complete, I don't know.
I know it's rough right now, though!
I started building my cockpit yesterday so I thought I'd show you. It's the first I've ever made, the first time I've worked with aluminium profile and the first time I've ever used a mitre saw, so it's a bit ropey, but hopefully it'll have a couple of interesting features that haven't been done before.
So far the cost is at approximately £170 after VAT and delivery, excluding tools I bought for the job but will keep afterwards. A breakdown:
Seat (from a 1st gen Mazda MX-5): £20, though technically £40 for the pair.
Wood for the seat mount: £20. It's 1400mm of 45x75mm and 1400mm of 90x90mm.
Hardware for the seat mount: £10 (two M8x500mm threaded rods, bag of M8 nuts, bag of M8x25mm washers)
Flexlink XDBM 22x22mm aluminium profile beam, 2 metres at £6.20 per metre (I bought some to test it out).
10 more metres after I was satisfied with it: £60.10.
T-slot nuts for XDBM 5mm slot: one bag of 10 for £11.87 (extortionate!)
Bag of 100 M5x25mm socket head machine screws: £10.37.
(I got these all from RS Components)
Tools: Dremel with cut off wheels and sanding... thing, Wickes own-brand mitre saw (£60 or so) and pillar drill (£50ish). You also need a 5mm and 9mm drill bit, but as aluminium is so soft a wood drill bit will do if you're slow with the drilling.
The measurements for the cockpit are: 850mm wide, 600mm deep and 600mm high. My seat mount is 145mm tall, and I found for my size the wheel was perfect at 600mm up from the ground. The centre console section is a fairly large 300mm wide, this is to accommodate the shifter next to a home-made hydraulic style handbrake, which I haven't made yet. The part for the buttons and toggles will extend down from the top of the cockpit down to the diagonal beam section where the shifter is located and will be made of acrylic probably mounted on MDF, the reason I haven't got it mounted directly to a beam is so that I have some flexibility in the design.
In terms of building the thing, let's just say I wanted it to be a learning experience and I've definitely learnt a great deal... The main things being: You can't drill a hole from both sides of the seat mount and expect them to line up perfectly, don't buy Wickes own-brand power tools if you need accuracy and Flexlink beams are cheap (ish) but EVERYTHING else to fit said beams is incredibly expensive.
I don't know if anyone else is building a cockpit with this aluminium stuff, but let me give you some advice. If the beams aren't cut perfectly and the holes aren't drilled perfectly, they won't line up, which is common sense of course. However, that's not such a bad thing because a small amount of deflection in getting the beams to fit means there's no room for it to wobble, so you get a tighter fit with less play. BUT, if you want to cover the cockpit in acrylic panels like I intend to, you'll run into problems, because none of the sides will be perfectly straight.
I will probably replace every join with a 90 degree bracket for better accuracy, but as they're £3.60 each and each bracket requires two T-slot nuts which are almost £12 for a bag of ten, there's no way I'm doing them all at once because that's going to cost more than the aluminium itself, in fact that will probably cost twice as much as the aluminium in the end, which is ridiculous when you compare the amount of aluminium you're buying. I mean one tiny bracket is more than half the price of one whole metre of the stuff...
Anyway, as it stands, it's actually surprisingly rigid and incredibly light. I've yet to screw it to my seat mount, but hopefully when I do that I can straighten it out a little, because as it is it feels like the horizontal part isn't parallel to my chest which is not much good. I was using it last night and apart from the base moving around (as it will given the lack of weight, lack of friction and lack of support) it was a lot better than I was actually expecting when I was putting it together.
The next step, apart from replacing the joins in stages, is to design and build the electronics. This is where the cockpit will get interesting, I think, because there are a few small details i want to add that I don't think have been done before. I don't want to go into them now because if I start listing all the things I want to do and find out they're impractical, too expensive or just don't work then my reputation will be ruined, possibly even shattered, and then I'll probably cry or something. I will however tell you that there will be three main parts; a PS3 controller board (not a Cthulhu board because they don't have analogue inputs), a keyboard matrix and an ATmega328 microcontroller. In the future there may also be either a Leo Bodnar SLI-M or an iPod Touch running sin:speed, or maybe even some actual dials from an actual car, but that's going quite far ahead.
After the control electronics I'm going to start on tactile effects, probably just a single channel with one or two drivers (seat and pedals) to start with and then I'll see what happens after that. After I've gotten the frame straightened out sufficiently I'll cover it in acrylic to give it a shiny black SuperGT-ish look (the ARTA NSX cockpit was my inspiration for the shape of it, by the way) instead of the current industrial structural look, and then I'll probably move out and have to sell it at a huge loss.
So, yeah, it's at a very early but functional stage at the moment, I can't promise regular updates and I know it's ugly as sin right now but it'll improve slowly. I want to improve it in such a way that there are distinct stages and leave it in a useable state between each stage so I can take breaks from it to do other things, so maybe I'll just update with every stage that I complete, I don't know.
I know it's rough right now, though!
Last edited:
. I actually bought a piece of memory foam to put under the removable seat pad. Still after a good length of time it puts my bum to sleep. Ive been thinking about getting something a bit more plush from a road car.
. But luckily the seat I have can be adjusted up and down.
