Throttle
On this page I will show you in detail how I build my throttle and the problems I ran into.
I used wood for the construction. On this foto you can see the axis and aluminium strips that will contain the sliding linear 100 kohm potmeters.
This is the throttle lever of engine 1 with the trust reverser lever. I put a little aluminium tube into the wood so it could move better around the axis
Picture from another builder that inspired me how to build the throttle. You can see how the trust reverser is build. The lever touches a microswitch. So trust revers will be on or of because there is no potmeter in it. But in this way you can build it more compact.
A first impression. You can see the aluminium rounded bar for the flaps lever.
Here you see the little iron pin that makes the connection between the turning flight controls and the sliding potmeters. The red connections are normally used in cars. I made these so it would be easy to remove or replace a part.
The levers are connected to the central axis by special nuts. If you use normal ones they will become loose after you use the levers. But that gave another problem. These nuts gave so much friction between the lever and the axis that when I moved
one lever, all the others begin to move too. To prevent this I blocked the axis by drilling a hole in it. A nail keeps the axis from turning.
A detail of the flapslever. It consists of 2 alu tubes. They slide into each other. With a dremel a opening is made in the outher tube. A bolt is drilled into the inner tube. The spring takes care for the tension. On the right is the iron pin to the pot.
I had to made 2 extra wooden interpositions to give a good support to the aluminium covering.
I made the openings with a precision tool (Dremel). Later I redid the lower part when I got the CNC machine.
And the final result. I used black letters that you can rub on the levers and then protected them with a coating.
The mechanism with the special nut did not work. After a little while it would loosen. So I extended the levers and had them travel between some mdf to get better friction. This works very well.
I was not stisfied with the first color I used. Eventually I found a color that fitted very well with the FDS panels and the aerosoft MCP.The light color is E4.20.50 and the darker is E4.15.25 (Flexa Ambiance).
Before I made the indents on the alu-bar for the flapslever I did experiment with the software. Don't do it the other way round, you could get unpleasant surprises. I used the standard B777 aircraft in FS2k2 with the standard B777200.txt file loaded into the Project Magenta CDU. When I lowered the flaps to 1 in FS I did not notice a change on the PM EICAS screen. I made all kind of changes into the B777200.txt file in the flaps section but nothing helped. After a long search I found out that although you see the flaplever (I mean the one on the screen in fs2k2) moving to 1 the flaps are not lowered in fact. So the PM software notices nothing (via FSUIPC) and so the EICAS screen doesn't show anything. You can see this if you use the program FSLOOK.EXE (in the FSUIPC-SDK package) and look to the flap settings. This is only for the B777 the B737 worked fine. Well how to take care that the flaps lowered indeed to 1 when the lever was pulled to 1?
The solution was in the aircraft.cfg file of the B777. As you see the flap-position 1 showed 0 degrees, the same as flaps up. Now I changed this into a 1 and everything worked flawlessly.
[flaps.0] //Inboard Trailing Edge
type = 1 // 1 - tail, 2 - lead
span-outboard = 0.2 // 0.0 .. 1.0
extending-time = 25 // seconds
flaps-position.0 = 0 // degrees
flaps-position.1 = 0 // degrees
flaps-position.2 = 5 // degrees
flaps-position.3 = 15 // degrees
flaps-position.4 = 20 // degrees
flaps-position.5 = 25 // degrees
flaps-position.6 = 30 // degrees
damaging-speed = 260 // KIAS
blowout-speed = 300 // KIAS
lift_scalar = 0.55
drag_scalar = 0.55
pitch_scalar= 0.55
system_type = 1
I made some little changes in the flaps section of the B777200.txt file of the PM software. This file contains the data how the flap indicator on the EICAS screen will look and it shows the flap retraction and extension speeds on the PFD on the speedtape.
See the PM doc for further documentation. FLPPOS can vary from 0 (up) to 40 (full down). FLPSET is displayed on the EICAS. So FLPPOS = 4/3 X FLPSET. For PM users:
flppos=0
flpset=0
vmin=vref0
vret=0
vext=vref0+15
vmax=330
flppos=1
flpset=1
vmin=vref1
vret=vref1+20
vext=vref1+10
vmax=255
flppos=7
flpset=5
vmin=vref5
vret=vref5+20
vext=vref5+10
vmax=235
flppos=20
flpset=15
vmin=vref15
vret=vref15+20
vext=vref15+10
vmax=215
flppos=27
flpset=20
vmin=vref20
vret=vref20+20
vext=vref20+10
vmax=195
flppos=33
flpset=25
vmin=vref25
vret=vref25+20
vext=vref25+10
vmax=185
flppos=40
flpset=30
vmin=vref30
vret=vref30+20
vext=vref30+10
vmax=170