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HOW THE SIMULATOR
WAS RESTORED
Photo courtesy of T. Ueda (All Rights Reserved)
​
PART 6 Starting the Restoration
One of the first jobs was to check all the parts were there and give them a good clean.
All four Ipeco Seats.
All the "Posh" Plastic Trims, both Cream and Brown,
the Boeing Colour Scheme.
All the Overhead Panels, A whisky Compass is seen here.
And some of the larger items like this P6 Circuit Breaker Box
which sits on the sidewall behind the First Officer.
John made a "Workbench". Lots of benches and Trollies would
be made, mostly out of the now defunct wood used in the Trolly
that was made for it to sit on at the Scout Hut.
Work strated on re-installing the Sidewall panels.
Note the bags of brackets and screws which had been bagged up in the USA.
Underneath lots of wiring and potentiometers, had to be installed
to interface the controls, all going to Interface cards.
John spent a lot of time on his back routing it all, which is why
the Flightdeck was placed up on Railway Sleepers.
Some wiring was a little more challenging, occasionally we could attach new wiring to the original Boeing ones, these are colour coded and as we had a list of the colours we could work
it out without too much trouble.
Above is just the wiring that comes out of the Control Yolks for all the buttons and switches.
February 9th 2019 was the 50th Anniversary of the Boeing 747's First Flight.
John put up some Birthday Banners !
After all the work on the underneath was done, we took time to measure everything
carefully to check that when the rear of the sim was re-assembled that it still fit
in the Cabin, It was clear that it was too tight on 3 railway sleepers
so we decided to Lift and Lower it, which was a bit tricky to be honest.
We can still work on the underneath for maintenance it's just a bit more of a squeeze !
Once again Martin did most of the Heavy Lifting !
with a 2 Tonne Car Jack of course !
More of the Sidewall Panels re-installed and all of the wiring
behind the main Instrument panel has been removed.
The next step was to install the Three Projectors above the Simulator,
it would be impossible to build this afterwards, we also needed to
see how accessible they would be afterwards to change bulbs etc.
Three Projectors installed.
A quick and dirty test to make sure everything was working
before building a Curved Projector Screen.
Bench testing the Autopilot units with PSX before Installing.
A Cold Winter day saw us re-attaching a huge chunk of the Floor, this is the back step.
and is important as it has holes in it for the Seating "J Rails".
Fitting the "J Rails" to the floor once the section was attached.
The front seats slide backwards and outwards to get into them.
The Autopilot now in and working and also seen here is some of
the Computer screens being fitted so that we can display the flight instruments.
Testing the Computer Screens.
We had to Size the Screens in PSX to fit the Panels.
All Panels now fitted.
All fitted and lit up.
Whilst at this stage, John made a Template to eventually cut and fit the Carpet.
Our Flightdeck had no window glass, these tend to be removed to go back into service, and
as each of the Front Screens can cost as much as a BMW Car, an alternative was needed.
We have found that these large sheets of 6mm thick Perspex work
wonderfully but can be hard to cut without breaking.
As the Front Screen curves in several directions John made a Cardboard
mock up, like a big jigsaw puzzle that could be laid onto the Perspex
as a template, the other side was identical and could be reversed.
Perspex Screen cut out ready to drill the fixing holes.
Fitted screens, luckily we found bolts to screw it in as in the USA they still
use Imperial size and now in the UK we have changed to Metric.
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