Wrecking the Sound Lab and Building the Base Floor
Fig. 3. The same room from a different perspective.
Fig. 2. The room within which our flight sim will reside in with an unfinished base floor.
We cleared out our room to make space for the base floor construction. We initially planned to build a proper floor and even found someone willing to design and build one for us, but they got busy with their studies, so two fellows decided to build it themselves out of Euro pallets, floorboards, and a PVC carpet. The total cost for the floor assembly came to around 650 Fr. It wasn't really built with longevity or sturdiness in mind, as we'll have to move it in a few years anyway; ETH is planning to build a student house to consolidate all student organizations under one roof. Anyway, we wanted to have the simulator assembled as quickly as possible to have something more presentable to attract new members with.
Fig. 5. The same mess from a different perspective.
Fig. 4. The Sound Lab with the door in the picture being the entrance to our fligh sim room.
In the process of moving everything out, we wrecked the sound lab for a while, until we had to move everything back in before anyone complained. It was a sight to behold, especially because I was busy with matters of consequence and couldn't get involved in the move. I had enough time, however, to pay a short visit and document the move at the exact moment it was the most chaotic at.
Fig. 6. Current status of the assembly.
This picture shows last Friday's progress. I got to help this time around. We didn't have any documentation, so most of the time was spent figuring out how to assemble it. Some things were labeled, but the cryptic labels rarely helped.
At some point, we figured out what belonged where and started assembling the outer frame. Some of the screws were extremely rusty, and then we had to deal with stripped screws. For that, we used a Dremel to cut a ridge to retrieve the screws with a flathead screwdriver. Though this wasn't the worst of it yet; the worst part came later during assembly. The metal frames that form the cockpit frame aren't that well-engineered... In other words, they are fu**ing sh**. Aligning those panels and screwing them together was such a pain in the a**, and this was only the first few; there's still 75% of it left to finish! We got it for free, but at what cost... This is especially interesting considering this flight sim was supposedly officially designed by Airbus themselves for training commercial pilots for flight procedures (note the amount of decoy buttons), yet it's as cheap and flimsy as you'd expect from something homemade.
Comming Soon...
Fig. 8.
Fig. 7.
...Further documentation and work on the electronics! (how exciting, I know) It's boring, but very important work, and it's always good to leave something for future reference. If I do find the time however, I will write something about the sim's origin and how we got it.
It's getting late, I gotta go sleep now.
Until next time!
