Simulator panel

I started work on a panel for my flight simulator. The material is Masonite paneling, about 1/8″ thick. The drawings came from here and I added center points for all the big holes using a free trial of AXCAD.

I printed the drawings full sized to a 24″ by 72″ sized PDF using CutePDF and then converted that PDF to a PNG image using ImageMagick. Finally that image file was printed on letter size paper on my Laserjet 4M using PosteRazor. After a lot of taping and measuring I had a paper template for my panel. I traced the outline using a pencil and transferred hole centers using an automatic center punch.

I cheated on the gauge sizes because the “standard” sizes are metric and hard to come by here in Imperial land. I used 2 1/4″ (57mm) and 3″ (76mm) instead of 56mm and 79mm. The gauges will most likely be made by me anyway so the slight size difference shouldn’t be noticeable. The next step is to build something to mount this to.

2 Responses to “Simulator panel”

  1. Patrick Callahan says:

    You don’t happen to have the posteRazor output pdf file anywhere? Could you send me a copy?

    I’ll be at http://flightsimcon.com/ at

    The New England Air Museum in Windsor Locks, CT, June 11-12 if you are there, I’d like to meet you.

    Otherwise, e-mail me.
    Thanks, Pat Callahan

  2. I do not have the output file, sorry.