The beginning of a dream..

Me and my buddy Stian has been talking about building a full size simulator since 2005 when we first met on a forum for the new Aeroworx Beech 200 airplane add-on for flightsimulator 2004. Stian had made this new livery texture for the airplane, and I volunteered to test his repaint. We kept in touch on a daily basis, and a few months later, I moved to the US to start my flight training at Phoenix East Aviation in Florida. One day Stian says that he wanted to come over to visit, and by darn the next week I picked him up in Orlando. You got to take in consideration that I had never met him in person before:) Since then we have been very good friends.

In March 2011 Stian was over at my place for a few days. We stubled across this ad on a flightimulator forum where this guys wanted to sell his near complete set of flightsimulator hardware. I said to Stian: I double dare you to buy this! It's NOW or NEVER.. Hehe.. One hour later we had allready spoken to the seller, and told him that we wanted it.. Three weeks later, and 1200 kilometer later, we had our simulator in the shop:)

And so the planning of the cockpit begun..

Here's a picture of the hardware we bought before we started to tear it down to pieces:

More from the teardown process. Here's the frame the simulator used to sit in torn to a thousand pieces:

And so now the real planning begins.. It took about a week and a half to finish the plans for the cockpit shell. Even after all that planning, we still had to do several small changes to the actual shell as we progressed.

After we were satisfied that the plans were usable, we bough all the materials needed to start building. Here's Stian posing.

Here's me doing the very first cut in the project:) We just had to take a picture of it..

Here are some pictures of how we progressed in the early stages of the cockpit build. I'll let the pictures do all the talking from now on;)