Advanced Sim Racing ASR6 Cockpit Review Part 1 "The Build"

[Music] hmm welcome to another edition of the simracing garage i'm barry rowland in this episode i'll be building the asr-6 aluminum profile cockpit from the guys at advanced sim racing this is part one of a two-part review series on the asr-6 called the build in part two of the series called the setup i will be adding sim racing gear and testing in real world conditions time to put this cockpit through the srg's review process and see how it does so let's get to it so let's take a closer look at the materials we're going to be using here for our build of the a sr6 cockpit now first thing you'll notice is they're white and they have a powder coat on them it's not just an anodization or paint these have been properly powder coated and very nicely done here very nice gloss finish to everything just yeah just nicely done and you can see that this is a solid profile in other words there's no holes in the channels over here it's a smaller hole in the middle not a very large one so this is a what i would call a full strength profile and they're using it in this piece they're using it in this piece here which is one of the support pieces for the shift mounter we'll find out more about that as we build it obviously and on this double 15 series piece of profile yeah these are very well done as far as the powder coat goes i just did a really nice job and of course white you know that's subjective as far as whether you would like that or not and this is a 15 series profile every other cockpit i've built from profiles has been from using a 40 series in 15 series it's the same thing obviously just a standard measure system instead of the metric measure system and yeah so essentially though they're close enough in measurements as far as channels and the size and everything that they're interchangeable you can put a 40 series bracket on a 15 series and vice versa they can switch back and forth the t-nuts will fit swappable so really it's nice that you know that even if you buy a 15 or a 40 series profile to start with that you can if you run across some 15 series that you can use that in interchange as long as your nuts your t-nuts and your bolts are the right sizes which they are too but they're going to be a different thread size because one standard one's metric obviously so yeah nicely done powder coating i like that they're solid here now these pieces the what i call 4160s but they call these one and a half by six inch because we're using standards so this is six inch wide this has some holes in it right but kind of smallish holes they're not very large and they're still the same i believe in the middle here they're the same thicknesses and i'll use a piece of 40 series to look at the difference i see this is called a light and that's not the extra light but it is a light series you can see how much larger the holes are in those channels there so and of course this is going to be lighter than something of the same size in this which is solid and you can feel it as soon as you pick it up it's it's a heavy unit this is going to be a pretty heavy cockpit compared to a 40 series light that i've built a few of those before again not that much heavier but still it's going to be heavy and let's see what else can we talk about here we're going to use these brackets here which are some very solid units you can see that instead of filling in the sides with gussets they have a complete triangle here and this is quarter inch thick or around six mil thick and so it's a very obviously strong piece here this is this is not going to be crushed this is not going to be bent this is a very very tough unit here and we're going to be putting these bolts in here now these are not m8 although they're very close to the same sizes as they make these are 5 16. again because everything is standard here so 5 16 by a 1 0 pitch and yeah the same thing's going on with the t-nuts now these are button heads instead of socket head caps and i'll show you why they're using those in a second instead of socket head and these are the spring ball t-nuts that we're putting in there and again this is the only way to build a rig is with these guys because we can put them in the ends slip them in like this or you can come in when you already have your rig completely assembled and just take it the t-nut and kind of push it down into the groove like this and kind of rest there and then we take a look you can take your finger and kind of push it up and it locks into the channel still moves but it won't come out very cool again this is the only way to build a rig is with these things so i'm glad to see that they included them in there now let's talk a little bit about the bracket differences now this is a typical bracket that i get from 40 series manufacturers and it is a gusted aluminum it has the hole filled in here where the other one does not but you can see the sides are much thinner than the thickness of what's going on with this bracket and we got some hollowed out pieces on the bottom too to make this even lighter so this would be a light type of gusseted bracket that i use all the time and every problem with so i know these are going to be very very stiff and i have a problem with those now there are no tabs on this for channel anti-twist tabs if you will and there are on this and just as a demonstration to show you how com compatible these guys are with each other 40 series bracket on a 15 series profile there it is it's just perfect and i can run an m8 bolt in there and a reg as long as i have the right t-nut on it right now i would need an m18 nut but in this case we're using again the 5 16 nut bolts over here and the 5 16 t-nuts because of the series but just to show you how this fits in here now also let me show you one more thing here is the this is the m8 bolt typically what i use in construction and it has a socket head cap on it you can see it's much bigger than the button heads or some people actually call these a pan head but yeah you can see the differences on how these are made right so we've got a bit more material in there i prefer these if i can get them but there's nothing wrong with these i mean they're going to do fine but the reason is if i take this and put it in here a button head and i put another one in there i don't have any problems with them hitting each other i take the socket head caps and put one in there and i put another one in here you can see i got interference issues it won't go down so when the because they're using these brackets we can't use them so that's why we're not using them but everything will be just fine with these 5 16 button heads you just don't want to over torque them and make sure that you get a wrench that fits them properly because you want to be careful with that a little bit more careful than you have to be with a socket head cap because it's got you can see a lot more metal and it's you know it's just got a lot more reinforcement around the hole than these guys do but these will work fine people use them all day long for a very long time and never had any issues with them so i guess that's it as far as looking at the construct materials we're using to build this asr-6 so we'll just get on to the building process now so as you can see i have the three main pieces of the chassis laid out and the back piece is 19 inches long or about 83 millimeters and we have these long pieces here 50 inches long around 1270 millimeters or so and remember this is a 15 series system as far as the profile goes we're using all standard hardware and equipment so that means this is a 5 16 bolt in here these little button heads i've pre-loaded these little corner brackets we're using you can see i've already got a couple of them one here and i just want to give you guys a close-up of what i'm doing here spring ball t-nut we have our bolt in there and then we have one on the other side so it's kind of pre-loaded all i have to do is slide it in at least that's the idea now the only thing to remember here is this is not metric again and we're going to need a 3 16 hex wrench to attach it with so can't use my metric wrenches for this have to pull out the old standard stuff which i use a lot anyway so it doesn't really matter so i'm going to do is go over here and slide this one in to the top of the back piece very top channel just like i have the two over there you see how it pre-configured this slide it in enough to clear the edge so obviously i can push this in without any interference i'm just going to snug this up a little to keep it from twisting on me and get it about even with the edge and then it's just a matter of kind of bringing this up i might have to bring you know push the profiles in a little bit to get them where i need them to be i'll start one and start the other one over here and you can usually get the it's a little wiggly you know when you're doing it but just take your time be a little patient and it should be okay and then i'm going to bring the other side in and do the same thing over here i'll give you guys a closer shot of that what i'm doing on that side get the bottom one lined up my hand in the way you can't see what i'm doing and chances are after lining up one another one will want to move on you because that's the way this stuff works so i usually use two fans two fingers to get them started like that and once they're started obviously if they haven't come out the other side you can just kind of slide this in a little bit until well one of the one down here came out okay there we go just wiggle it around a little bit and it finally comes together and i'm going to want this to be even this face on this side to be even with the rear of these profiles so i'm going to do that on one side and then the other and then kind of just come in here with my wrench snug this up a little bit just a little bit because i'm just bringing it in i don't want to get it real tight yet and you should have nice square corners here on this this system because profile in general living a profile when you're building it and you're using these 90 degree brackets here then it'll give you perfect 90 degree squares out here on your legs or whatever you want to call this and yeah just come back here make sure i have it snugged up and then i'll check a few things just to make sure i'm nice and flushed down here on the bottom and the top because sometimes you can get flush on the top and it's because i have this on cardboard it can lean a little bit which i see it's done here and i'll just now i'll just come in and just start fiddling with it a little bit loosen everything up let everything fall together and line up perfectly like it should and it does really easy to do this stuff it's better to loosen everything up once you have the t-nuts in just so everything can fall together on one side or the other this looks beautiful back here on this side i'll go over here and do the same thing on this side i'm gonna loosen those two sides real quick there we go and now i can get push everything nice and square i'm using my finger on the back of this feeling for edges and when you can't feel the edge and just feel the crack that means you're right where you need to be and you can go ahead and start tightening things down a little bit i'll do the top first then i'll go down and double check on the bottom and make sure it's good and straight if i feel a little bit off i can take this and tap it a little bit because remember this guy down here is still loose and this one's not real tight just tap it a little bit yeah and that's exactly where i want it right there and yeah just snugging it up not going to get it real tight yet because i have some other things i want to do and we'll just go ahead and go to every single bolt like that there you have it the bottom part is assembled now i'm going to go to the next one i haven't made my mind up what i'm going to do yet but it says at this point on their instructions that you can put the feed on and you can do that but because i only have a support back here and this stuff is really heavy remember this is the solid stuff with just very small holes so it's a very heavy type of profile heavy duty which is good by the way i like that but when i lift this up it'll probably stay together to put the feet on the bottom but i think i'm going to put something one of the other parts on first to put some more support down at that end before i've tilted up and put my feet on so when we come back we'll take a look at how i'm going to proceed with that so this is the pedal tray for the cockpit i'm going to be putting this on next and this is a massive beast here it comes in at 20 almost 22 pounds and that's almost 10 kilos so this is a very substantial piece of kit here this is looks like to be a big stamped piece of metal it's quarter inch thick the back is this way and this is what will be facing towards the front of the cockpit and you can see on the top there's a lot of groove space here for mounting whatever pedals that you want to mount on the sides again we have those big slots in there and that's for height so we can put it up and down to where we want it to be and we also have remember those one and a half inch by six inch side profiles where this is going to be mounted to that they each have four channels in them so we can even use the different channel heights to increase the height even more on this so it looks like this can go pretty high quarter inch thick steel plate it's just a heavy duty unit as you might imagine it's really going to stiffen up the front end and give some mass to the front end of this cockpit at being so heavy and we're going to be using these usual fasteners here we've been doing so far and that is the spring t-nuts here that come with your kit and we're going to be using the button head 5 16 bolt so really not much else i can show you here on this as far as you know what it is but we're gonna go over and put it on the cockpit and see how that goes so now i'm just gonna slide this plate in i've got my t-nuts already attached as you can see so i want to put it in this top groove up here though because i want to be able to get as high as possible so i can get my heels nice and level with the same plane that my bottom is and the seat back there so these are on the same angles so you have to kind of start one and then fiddle with the other one to get it to go in so it's going to be a bit of a dance here i think if you pick it up like this you can get one started if i keep the angle up like that and get one of these guys to go in and then i have this one that needs to go in obviously so i'm going to come over to the other side bring this in have this a little loose still so i can maneuver these a little bit and we might be able to make this work on the first try so get him in the channel and there he goes all right so these guys are started in the front channels now i can just kind of pick it up as i bring it to myself and slide it very gently because i don't want to mess up my finish if at all possible and i am going to start this t-nut with the ball first because that's the longer way and that's going to allow me hopefully to get the next one lined up where it needs to be and i'll just go with the short way on the other t-nut and see if that'll work of course this can be like i said before fiddly get one started and the other one's not started and we don't have any way to really hold it like i did on the other one yeah this is gonna be a little bit okay now i'm getting this side started a little i would not say this is going smoothly as i would like it to there we go that's got it yes okay so that was the hardest part was getting it up into the top channel and now i'm just going to kind of gently it's not really rubbing against anything i can see that it's really not rubbing hard or anything like that i'm just going to bring it in to where it's going to be out of the way of the front because we got another plate we're gonna have to put up on the front eventually but now i'll be able to lift this up you can see the range that i have here that's about five inches it looks like it's pretty high but i want to get this sort of where i want it to be before i get the pedals on it because this is a heavy plate as we discussed before and yeah with pedals sitting on top of it's going to be even heavier so if you want to make any adjustments after you have your pedals mounted it's going to be even more difficult to get under here and pick it up at the same time you're trying to loosen and tighten these bolts over here so i'm going to get i figure out a way to get this jacked up to i'm going to do some mock-up so i'm going to get this raised to where i think i need to have it before i move on to the next piece to put on so let's take a look at the parts that we're going to need to use to create our feet and here's one foot and it has a solid metal threaded rod coming out with a ball at the end and a nut here that's made as as one piece we have two free spinning nuts here that's going to sandwich our plates together so we can hold the foot to it and on the bottom we have a softer rubber piece for anti skid or anti slip and a harder piece here now this is a ball socket design but if you look on this bolt here let me run this down a little you can see that there's these flat spots that have been machined on here even though it still spins like a ball interesting so that's what we're going to be using as the actual foot and of course we're going to be using the usual 5 16 bolts with the 3 16 hex wrench size on the top little button head units and of course our spring ball t-nuts that we've been using throughout and we'll continue to use throughout and let's take a look at the plate itself this is a quarter inch thick or almost six and a half millimeters very hefty little plate here one and a half pounds so yeah everything that i'm pulling out of the box for this rig is very heavy because instead of being made out of aluminum like any other rig that or profile type rig anyway that i've reviewed this is all steel plate which is going to make it heavier of course which is going to add mass to the whole rig make it more dense feeling i'm sure and i have one pre-configured here just to show you what it looks like and yeah pretty simple we got both of our bolts in these two holes here our foot holes down here and we're going to have the foot sitting like this and this will be sitting on the bottom of our profile right here and of course our t-nuts are just going to feed into that and depending on which way front or rear that you're putting your foot on in the diagrams they're showing the foot like this so the angle should be like this so the foot's kicking out this way instead of the foot kicking towards each other that way right of course i suppose you can do it any way you want to and it's just a matter of feeding the t-nuts in very simple and i'm always keeping pressure off of this plate as i'm feeding these pieces along because i don't want to mar or scratch up my nice powder coat finish here and as far as the distance of putting in that's arbitrary depending on what you want to do i'm just going to make sure that this edge here is clear of the flat plane that runs across the back of the cockpit itself in case i want to put something up against that it doesn't interfere with the foot itself but other than that you're good to go you can see this is going to kind of tip over now there's a couple of ways to do this i'm i was thinking about just tipping the cockpit over on one side and then sliding them in and then putting it back down and then picking up the other side and doing the same thing but once we have the feet on the feet themselves will be holding all the weight so what i probably end up doing is just jacking it up on one side on the back and then go over to the front lift it up so i can slide these under and then set it back down probably the best way to go about doing it without putting too much stress on the connections and on the profiles that we've already have built anyway we'll go over and get these feet put on and see how that goes so now we're sliding the feet on and you can see i already have two feet on the back and you can see the direction i have the feet pointing towards the back on the back and on the front these will be sliding in like this so the foot will be pointing towards the front and of course you could always do it the other way if you wanted to depending on what you need so very simple stuff here as we saw before just gonna slide the t-nuts in bottom channel [Music] very simple and again i'm going to kind of eyeball it for now and put my hand under here and just snug up these nuts a little bit i have just enough room under here to get my hand to work on this right and we'll go over to the other one and put that one on same deal pretty quick work here once you have this blocked up and as you can see i am using the blocks here instead of turning it on its side and doing it and i'll just kind of eyeball this for now because i'm not going to get it totally tight just at the moment because i'm going to level it out first i might even move it around a little bit before i do that because this rig is going to start getting heavier as we put more parts on it so there we have it and for tightening this up as you know i don't have a lot of room down here so i have a special wrench that i'll be using which is this guy here and that's a convenient little wrench to have so we can get underneath things put a little bit in there for the 3 16 nut and feel it around to where it'll go in yeah and then just tighten it up very easy to do it's nice to have the tools for the right situation like that perfect so now that we have this tightened down i'll go ahead and take the blocks out and we'll come back and see how that looks so i have the feet tightened down and leveled out where i want them and at this point i think we're going to reposition the rig to where it's going to be sitting for me to test it which is going to be in front of the cart over here next to my 5 dof motion rig over there so yeah i think i'm going to go ahead and move it because again as we're putting more stuff on this or more parts on the cockpit it's going to get a lot heavier it's not going to be as easy to move around so i think i'm going to go ahead and do that also if you'll notice my pedal tray has been raised i have this sitting three inches proud of the rail because i've already calculated the pedals i'm going to be using will be sitting in those slots and also remember we're going to have two pieces going over here for our seat rails and we'll be bolting our seat over there to those rails so it's going to be about three inches or so for the pedal tray where my heels are going to be resting are going to be level with where my bottom is in the seat once it's been mounted so it's just things like that you need to calculate as you're putting it together because it's not the easiest thing to raise this 22 pound plate as you might imagine by yourself but i did have a friend called jack and he came over and helped me out as you can see here so i just ended ended up just jacking it up to the height i needed then tighten everything down so it worked out fine and you'll also see that on the next segment i'm going to be looking at this little aesthetic beauty plate that we're putting on the front that ties the front together on the end of these two long profile pieces we're going to have some bolts going in tying that all up so we'll go ahead and look at that next i'm going to go ahead and put this front plate on it's kind of a static plate but it also has a function of tying the front profiles together and so the profiles have tapped holes that are 5 16 threads in the top and the bottom parts of it so that'll fit this plate and that'll tie everything together they show in the destruction is doing this last but really once you get your pedal tray mounted where you want it or in the general area where you want it you can go ahead and put this on then and that's what i'm going to go ahead and do because i'm about to turn it around to where i won't have easy access to it so i'm going to go ahead and get this put on and of course all we're going to be using is the usual button head 5 16 bolts here that are a 3 16 hex wrench size on the tip and yeah we just go over and get this bolted on i have the plate over here now we're gonna go ahead and mount it up and as you can see we have two holes that have been tapped in this profile here these long pieces we have one on the bottom and one on the top and these are 5 16 threads so we're going to be using again these little button head 5 16 bolts now i ran into a bit of a problem and i wanted to show you guys this how i fixed it or how you can fix it anyway first off i usually just go ahead and put one bolt in obviously i'm going to lift this up put a bolt in on this side over here and usually when i'm doing this i'll kind of glance at what's going on over here and i could see right away that this hole here was too far out it wasn't lining up with this hole now i'm pretty sure this plate and the holes are milled out perfectly like they should be but we're dealing with a long piece of profile here this goes all the way back down there it's 270 millimeters 50 inches if you're out just a little bit down there as far as square when you bring it back up here this long it just magnifies itself so here's how we can handle this i'm going to go ahead and put this other bolt in i'm going to pick it back up and go ahead and put both bolts in one side i'm not going to make them real tight i just want them to kind of help support the plate when i'm working over here on this side right then we take one of these guys and this is a big box clamp and i'm going to clamp the top first now it's going to be easier to do this because i have the pedal tray up all the way if i had this pedal tray all the way down it'd be a little tougher to squeeze it together but i need to tray up this high anyway so yeah it works out for me i'm just going to put this on the top part first and just tighten it down and this is plastic on the end of this so it will not mar the powder coating and i'm just going to start twisting this and turning it down until i get over here and take a look and see if my hole is lining up we're almost there i'm going to go ahead and see if i can tighten it a little bit more and that's right on it so now that i have that hole lined up i'll just go ahead and put this bolt in just like you would in doing any anything else obviously go ahead and put this in and i'll get down and look and see where i am on this hole and this one's also out that way that means i got to squeeze it in on the bottom part best way to do that is to go ahead and release what i have here and then come down the bottom here and do the exact same thing just line it up and i'm gonna you see how far i have this pulled out the edges of this clamp i don't want it all the way in to be pushing in here i wanted to catch the very edge because that'll be the easiest way to get this to pull in so i'm just going to tighten it up it's already coming in and that might have it right there let's try it there we go that's how we fix these things now i can tighten these up and i'll come back obviously with my wrench and give it a good tighten and i can remove my clamp [Music] and we're good to go so now this is fixed tightly and again the reason i want to do this now is because i'm getting ready to flip this around and i won't have easy access to this especially when it turned out to be not quite aligned properly at the very ends of these profiles again this is not something that surprises me because yeah we're bolting things together it's not like we're doing cnc machining operations here with you know thousandths of an inch or a millimeter tolerances and i know this because i did the center measurements and it looked to be exactly the same on these bolt holes so it's definitely this being out but it's nice that there's ways to fix this and i just want to show you guys one of the ways to do it now we're going to put the seat rails on and this is what we'll be attaching either if you have a set of sliders or like me i'm just going to be putting some side mount seat brackets on top of these but yeah this is what's going to span across the width of our cockpit these are 22 inches or about 500 or 560 millimeters long and you can see i already have a t-nut in one of them i usually pre-load these things before i take them over and it's very simple what we're going to do we're going to be using a corner bracket we're going to use two for each one of these bars this with one on just one side instead of having one on each side just one side which is probably all you need and we're going to be using obviously our t-nuts and our 5 16 bolts the button heads and our spring balls and this is what it's going to look like when we attach it and i'd go ahead and pre-attach one and it's very simple the way this is going to work because i already put the t-nut in here this will just sit down across of course this will be spanning our cockpit that'll sit down across like that we'll come in drop a bolt in get my 3 16 wrench and just run that down and so that's the way it'll sit and then we can actually loosen this up all of them and be able to slide the seat back and forth very carefully because you don't want to mar up your nice finish that we have here this nice powder coat we have so that's how it's going to work very simple we're going to go over there we're going to attach this and see what it looks like now i have the seat rail mounts mounted very simple like i showed you in the first segment of this part where we were going to mount these corner brackets straight onto the side of the rails couldn't be easier in fact because we don't have the plates on the back here in these channels you could actually just slide this on but you have to be very careful if you're going to do that because again we don't want to hurt this nice powder coat finish which i have to say with this black and white contrast going on here is starting to grow on me a bit i wasn't sure about it at first definitely different so yeah everything successfully mounted there again very simple operation if you've been following me up to this point yeah this is very easy stuff to do so what we're going to do now is get to our wheelbase upright mount which is one of the main things we have to do now we're going to install the wheelbase support uprights and again here the advanced sim racing cockpit does not disappoint very massive and dense heavy stuff that we're using here this plate is three eighths thick and it's steel imagine it is pretty heavy and that's what is that about almost 10 millimeters thick just just below it and yeah very substantial it's four over four pounds like four pounds four ounces just under a kilo like 1.9 something kilos so yeah very massive plate here and if you can see on the front here we have some countersunk holes actually this is going to be facing the profile when we bolt it on to the system over there so we're going to have these countersunk holes and we have these flathead 5 16 bolts that we're going to be putting in them so when we tighten them up you can see it will be flush and will not interfere with the profile that we're mounting this to very simple we're going to do here flip this around already got some t-nuts in here let me put another one i'm looks like i'm one short slide this guy in here i'm going to put them down towards the bottom edges here because you're going to want this sitting as close to the bottom as possible i would imagine because that gives you as much the maximum extension going that way as far as the wheelbase height when you mount your wheelbase support or frame or whatever we're going to use for that we'll see that that mount when we get to it but yeah it's just a matter of lining these up like this very simple stuff we put our flatheads in see underneath four of those over here and we can move this around while it's still loose to align the holes like we want them just look straight down in here and see them and we take our 5 16 wrench out and again i'm watching my edge down here i want to make sure it's flush and kind of run your finger down there and feel when it's perfectly flush and then go ahead and slowly in a pattern tighten this down because i don't want it to move when i'm tightening it down and as you pull these flat heads down into those counter bevels right those countersunk holes it kind of pulls it one way or the other so if you do it in a rotation it'll keep everything nice and straight that's the theory anyway easy enough to attach it right so then what happens is we're going to go over to the cockpit over there and this is going to go up against the side of the the side rails those six inch tall rails and we're going to be putting in these button heads now these are a little bit longer than the normal button heads that we've been assembling this cockpit with to this point but it's going to be the same thing just the bolt goes through there and they're longer because it's such a thick plate here and then we're going to put our t-nut in and attach it what i'm probably going to do is put the t-nuts in first and then just come in and hold this up as i line the holes up because we can actually slide this back and forth a little bit while we're lining up the holes in our t-nuts so we can get our bolts in but you'll see that once we get over there and start doing it which we are going to do right now so we're going to go ahead and mount this now now this is a pretty heavy piece as you might imagine so you want to make sure that you're supported correctly for it and what i'm going to do is just kind of hold it up i can see my t-nuts are in here kind of line them up here now i usually get the top ones in first and that kind of lets it hang a little bit and then we can maneuver around and get to the other ones what i'm going to do is just kind of pick it up like this get it into my shoulder so i can get plenty of support on it not that difficult to do but you want to be able to move it around a little bit so you can get into that t-nut once i'm in there now i have to grab the other t-nut or rather bolt and come over here to the next t-nut and i'm kind of looking down here and pulling the plate away so i can try to figure out where that thing is and i got it in pretty easily there so you make it look real easy huh so now i'm stabilized and that's what i want so i'm still going to be taking the pressure off of this as i go for the other t-nuts and what i'll do is look over here and see where it is and a lot of times i'll just take my wrench and get down low and push that in to where i can see it lines up with the hole like that and sometimes you're lucky enough you don't have to take pressure off the thing and you screw it in sometimes not all the time it doesn't look like this one's you shake it a little bit while you're screwing it in sometimes you can grab it and there it goes how lucky with that one now i'll get down and take a look at this other one and it's a little off so i'll put my wrench in the hole and move it back towards me it wasn't going that way too far still needs to come back a little bit a little bit too far find her back up there i think that'll do it so let's try it let's see looks like i got it so there you have it now i don't know where this is going to end up so obviously i don't have my motor mounted i don't have my seat on so yeah it's you're gonna have to move this so what i usually do when i need to move it is i'll loosen these bolts up a little bit so i have enough room to pull this out and then slide it where i want to slide it so i'm kind of taking pressure off the bottom taking some weight off of it and pulling out at the same time and i can move it without scratching my finish i do the same thing on all finishes gray black whatever it is so it's just kind of a pick it up pull it out and kind of slide it that way the only thing really rubbing is the t-nuts inside the channels where you can't see it anyway and i'm going to leave it right about there because again i'm not sure where i'm going to end up with all this stuff and i'm just going to go ahead and give it a little bit of a snug but not real tight because i know i'm going to be moving this again and there's no reason to get it real tight right now i'm not going to be hanging a wheel on it at this time but when i'm going to hang a wheel on it with the bracket in the wheel all one piece you're want to make sure you got this properly supported so yeah not that big of a deal we'll go ahead and install the other side come back and see what it looks like so we've got the other wheelbase upright on and they're all evened up as far as the cockpit is concerned at least for now i'm sure i'll be moving this later because once we get the wheelbase support or bracket on and mounted to these uprights and then we get a steering wheel on it and all that good stuff that's really where we're going to be able to tell where these need to be in relation to where my seat rails are and i can move those seat rails back some more if i want to and i can actually flip the back one around so that the brackets are on the inside not on the outside pointing towards the back and give me a little bit more room if i need it towards the back of the rig so it's a couple of ways to get this done but yeah everything is looking pretty good to this point so we'll just get on to the next segment so let's take a closer look at the mounting solution we're going to be using to put our direct drive motor onto this asr-6 cockpit very massive piece of 3 8 thick or almost 10 millimeter thick steel plate here and you can see it's been bent when it was still hot so we have nice flanges on the side for mounting the hole pattern here will fit a simucab pro a sport not sure about the ultimate i've never reviewed one of those but i know it will fit either one of those because that's what it said on the box that i pulled this bracket out of it'll also fit a midge motor small image at least i've already test fit that and that's what i'll be using for testing and i also went over to the cold morgan 54g that i have and it will also fit that down towards the in size of these slots so a good range i think of direct drive wheel bases that we can put on this are motors and you can see we have the aesthetic cutouts here and i like that they didn't take a whole chunk out of here one solid piece even though there is a disconnect in this pattern you can see there so it's kind of at least they left this parts in and didn't cut all this out so i think it's well you know 3 8 steel plate i think we're going to have a problem with stability on this as far as bending take it around the side we have on each side two very long slots and this will give us a lot of adjustability for reach on the steering wheel once we have everything mounted up and yeah i like that they have some nice long slots on here now we're going to be using the bolts that comes in the kit and it comes a little plastic bag there's individual plastic bags for all the pieces here so you know what you're supposed to be putting on and and where to put it i'm going to kind of counter it do it a little i can't do it sideways all the way i can't i guess just don't want to fall off it would make a massive noise hitting the ground so we're going to be using these 5 16 button head bolts like we have been using throughout but these are a little bit longer obviously for compensating for the thickness of this plate and of course we have the 3 16 hex wrench size on the top and we're going to be using our spring t-nuts as usual and there's going to be four of these on each side i'll go ahead and just put these on we're going to have two on the top two on the bottom and i'm gonna be mounting these you could mount them in just remember the uprights have a three slot pattern to them and we could put them in any of the two slots we want but i'm going to spread the load and you just mount this to the inside and outside slots that's how i normally do all these types of things anyway because you want to spread the load every chance you get across the full piece of that wheelbase upright because it's going to be a lot of weight it's supporting i mean we take this thing it's 13 pounds or six kilos and then we put a motor on it that's another i'm not sure what the midge weighs but i know it's it's probably around 15 pounds or so or if not more so yeah we're going to have a a pretty hefty piece here that we're going to be have to be holding up and sliding down into those channels and you might want to have a friend handy to help you with that when you do this or you could just mount the plate and then hold the motor up and put the bolts in for the motor but i've always found it a little easier because of trying to hold a heavy motor up and getting the bolts in and then getting the nuts on the back by yourself can be a bit of a challenge right so this is how we're going to mount it and what we're going to do next is i'm going to obviously put the other pieces of hardware in here and then we're going to go over here and see if we can get it to slide down in these channels to see just how easy or difficult that is so you can see we have the mount now attached and our motor is attached to the mount and the reason it's already attached is because as i normally do when i'm mounting a motor mount system to a profile rig i'll mount the motor to the mounting bracket first it's just easier for me because i'm always by myself when i do these things usually and it's easier to wrap an arm around underneath the motor and use that as a way to balance it as i'm trying to get the t-nuts in and yeah i'm running some b-roll here while i'm talking and show you guys what i was doing and yeah you just kind of drop it straight down you get two sets or one set rather of t nuts on one side then you go to the other side get the other set started it's a back and forth game if you will a little dance and the whole time i'm trying to hold up this motor mount assembly which was no easy thing to do because it's over 36 pounds what we're looking at here at this mountain this motor combined that's 16.4 kilos or somewhere around there so very heavy unit and yeah because i've done this a lot that's the way i do it and this is just the way i figured out it was easiest for me to do it because i'm always by myself around here so um every once in a while i have a friend available to help me do something another important part here is on this upright you want to make sure that you have it loose on both sides you want this panel or the plate rather to be loose you want the bolts to be loose in that so that they will spread apart at the top especially on this particular motor mount because it was a tight squeeze going in here with both of these sides loose as you can see here i still have some bolts well i don't know how well you can see it but they are loose and then because i'm going to move it around also while i'm doing that so that obviously i i'm going to have to get the reach right on this so i left them loose to do that too but yeah you want it loose so that you can spread them apart at the top here as you're putting the motor mount down in there so yeah we got it done end of the day that's all that matters and i've already got it set up pretty much where i think i'm gonna want it i already put my seat on there just place it on the rails real quick just to get a general idea of how high i wanted it to be so yeah we'll get on to the next segment now we're going to take a look at the shifter mount and that consists of the main piece which would be the top piece that we mount our shifters to this is a double piece of the 15 series which means it's one and a half inch this way and three inches that way and here's a single piece and of course these are all solid aluminum profiles again the nice powder coat done everywhere on both sides solid down there so no holes in the channel pieces that are next to the grooves now this is going to sit in here like this typically of how you'll see a shifter mount done in a profile series and the reason why you'll see a lot of this is because well it works don't mess with success kind of thing now we're going to have a corner bracket in here joining here i've already got them pre-assembled as you can see with my little t-nuts sitting in there we're going to have one sitting over here and it will be sitting like this so we have a t-nut going that way to attach to our upright over there same way this guy can be sitting there now there is another piece to this that we have to remember and that is the spacer this is 3 8 of an inch or almost 10 millimeter spacer and remember if you saw the wheelbase uprights when we installed them we installed them on the same thicknesses but much larger plates obviously to the size of the profiles that are on the base so we need to because when we install this it's going to be offset from those profiles the long profiles by as much as the width of that wheelbase upright mount so it's going to have an offset to it and we have to match the offset with this down piece here if we don't it's going to be crooked and it's not going to work right so we put this on the bottom like this it'll stick out a little bit like that one hole will go in with a t-nut in here and the other one will go into the side of the profile so this is how this is working we have a countersunk hole here to the bevel there and we have a flathead bolt that's going to go in there like this and then we put the t-nut on the other side simple stuff it doesn't matter where you put this because you can would only matter once i start putting it on here how i want to disoriented so i'm just going to slide this in right now like that spin it around the other side i think because i'll just keep that kind of the same way now you're going to have to figure out where you want the height of your shifter because once you have this tightened down you can't get to it anymore it's what we call a blind screw because once this is on the profile you attach this to the profile and we have our shifter sitting in there let's do it like this easier to see if i want to move the shifter height or the brake whatever i'm using then i can't slide it like that because the screw on the bottom here that flathead is firmly attached to this so i can't slide it it's you have to take the whole thing off too to get it to slide like you want it to and i'm not crazy about this design i do something personally i do something different when cockpits have that design but that's what you have to remember that you need to pre-adjust this thing to the height of the shifter that you want then tighten it down then you can put that piece on now you could just leave this piece on and slide this piece off right and just unloose loosen it here and the whole thing will just slide this way and then you can flip it around make your adjustment where you think you need it tighten it back down flip it back around and slide it back into that t-nut and then tighten it down so it's not a huge operation but yeah it's just one of those things that has to be done because of the offset that this piece of profile is going to have when it's actually attached to our upright and you'll see that more when we get there so i'm going to do is go ahead and pre-assemble this thing before i get it over there because my idea is i'm going to just take this and put this forward here and get this to go on and we'll get this one to go in over here isn't it fun building with profile so yeah we'll have this one on here like this and that's what it'll look like with the bottom piece down and of course i'll have go ahead and put these on i snug them up a bit and i'm going to slide the whole thing down so we're going to take it over to the rig and see how that works out so there is the shifter mount all mounted up and i did exactly like i said when i was showing you guys this on the bench i just pre-installed the corner brackets on the front there and pre-installed the one on the back and then just went ahead and slid the front ones the front t-nuts you can see them down in there from here down very carefully didn't to scratch anything and it's pretty easy to do this is you know it's not as heavy as some of the other things we've put on this rig so yeah not too bad so i got it to the height i think it'll be where i want it to be if i was going to use a shifter or a handbrake or something like that and i pre-installed the bracket back here too and now we have our spacer located in the second from the top channel and you can see the offset i was talking about this is you can see the space in between that and of course that's created by this big plate that we mount these wheel upright pieces to because it's offset from this panel by about 3 8 of an inch or almost 10 mil so we have to make up for it with that guy and again if i need to adjust the height then i would take this piece here and i would just loosen this bolt and loosen this one here probably just take it out obviously and then this whole thing will slide straight down out of this bracket and then i can take it off readjust this piece down here to the height i want it to be on the channel to get to match up where where my top bar is now and then reinstall that and then slide it back up into our corner bracket tighten it back down and then tighten that bolt right there down and you're done so that's how you would make adjustments right shifter mount is on we don't have much further to go i do have a couple accessories i'm going to be putting on and we'll go over those next so now it's time to assemble the keyboard accessory and there's two ways to do this as far as the options you have for the top this is a flat top and it's made from a an aluminum piece or sheet on each side of this with some some kind of a tough plastic in between that that makes it very stiff i don't know if it's delrin or not but it's something might be because it's machinable you can see where they kind of machine this out and it's you can see the aluminum piece there the shiny bits around that countersunk hole each side there for the flathead bolt that will go in there we also have this monster they're both the same length 22 inches but this is metal this is eighth inch thick metal so it's very heavy it's like seven pounds 10 ounces or a little over right at i think three and a half kilos or so so this is a substantial piece hanging off your rig which i'm not sure what how it's going to do when we put this on i'm sure it works but i'm going to say it's pretty darn heavy i think i'd rather see this in aluminum and yeah this is a lot lighter it's probably going to be easier to maneuver and won't drag as much on the joint that we're going to be using speaking of which this is a 90 degree pivot and a lot you know a lot of people use these i have a couple of these on my rig for different things very convenient when you need it for swinging things around and if you look on the end of these you see these slots in here and i've have this tab piece in here in one slot and the other side i've already got the other two installed and if you look on there you can see there's the number eight on them here's one of them not yet installed and you can see it has an eight two but on the other side it has a tin right yeah make sure it wasn't upside down or anything and that's the different sizes for the channels that we're going to use on the profile and we have a piece of profile here that's four inches and i'm going to use that as an example the 8 fits in that channel see that there doesn't stay very well but it fits in there the 10 obviously is not going to fit it's just too wide right so the purpose of these is it goes in when you push this or rather bolt this thing on that tab goes into the end of the channel so it's an anti-twist or anti-torque kind of deal if you will and i'll show you how that works first off i'm going to go ahead and put this in an empty slot and you want to make sure your slots are in the right orientation when the way you want them to go into the channels and you want the way you want your hinge to be working i left some t-nuts in here to remind me of where i want that tab to be so when it's in there it'll keep it from twisting so you just kind of lay it in here now i've already pressed this one in along with the others and took it back out so when you first put these in they usually stand pretty proud and you have to kind of just take the joint and we'll use the small piece for this demonstration and just push the tabs into the joint channels go in there there it is like that but it's going to be pushed out because the tabs are still going to be sticking out and to press the tabs in it's a friction fit it's not that hard to do what you'll need is one of these that i just dropped but i got another one and that's again 5 16 button head that we've been using all throughout this review and i'll just go ahead and put it in the hole here that's in this bracket right there just kind of line the hole up and you turn it obviously so we can access the hole and as i'm tightening it up i'm going to watch my tabs and make sure put it back on the flat here make sure that they're going in like they should as i'm tightening down now when they're still when you first put them in there they're not going to want to go in real easy because there's a friction fit inside this bracket here this actual pivot so you're just going to keep screwing it in until it's it friction fits into so it ends up like that nice and flush see how flat that is right and they're pressed down in there and they should stay there but you only get to do this like once or twice before it gets too loose and they don't want to stay anymore then you have to kind of push them in and hold them while you're tightening it up so they don't fall out so try to get it right the first time so yeah that's all there is to this stuff pretty simple and we do the same thing to this profile and this is 22 inch long profile it has another hole that's tapped on the end of it on the other end of course it's just the powder coat just like this little piece and we will push this over like that i'll put that in there i'll pivot this out of my way so i can get to the bolt hole grab another bolt kind of lean down see where it's going and get it to go in there and just tighten it down like you would any other way any other bolt that we're putting in and this is already set as far as the tabs on this side so i don't really have to worry about cranking down on it now sometimes the tabs are so stiff going into this pivot flange that you have to get like a i would get a 5 16 ratchet type of hex tool with a ratchet and just get some torque on it and it'll go ahead and press in but i was lucky and got it was able to do it with just my driver here there we go so now we have it and this is going to sit on the side of the wheelbase this piece here on the long the wider side of that wheelbase upright support and we have two corner brackets they give you the kit for that and we're just going to put the corner brackets on either side one's going to be sitting on the top like this and then we'll have one underneath on the bottom and we'll have this one attached obviously to the upright on the for the wheelbase and then the bottom one will also be attached on the other side kind of like this all right just like we attached something out anything else to the profile very simple stuff they give you enough t-nuts and bolts to make that happen with these brackets and yeah that's about it what we'll do next is just go over here to the rig and install it and see how it looks so i have the assembly attached to the side of the wheelbase upright i have this on my left side if i'm facing the steering wheel if you're living somewhere where you have your controls on the left side then obviously you put on the other side and you see this swings rather nicely here you can go all the way underneath your wheel for storage when you keep it out of the way as long as your wheel itself is not hanging down too far down here when you're using it now we're going to attach the keyboard tray to this let me go get that and i got a couple of 5 16ths balls of the normal stuff that we use here on this build and i should have this pretty much lined up and remember this is kind of a heavy plate here for this keyboard tray i think i'm probably going to end up going with the plastic one because this is pretty massive if you need a big keyboard i guess you know that's fine just let it hang there get our wrench out very simple stuff here as usual when you get this far it's just pretty much elementary at this point and there you have it swills again you can type sideways or yes you can't really type this way so again i think a flat one that's what i have right now is more of a flat one i think that will work better for me but this is nice for you know if you want to put a big keyboard onto your cockpit there you go you definitely can fit one on this 22 inch long guy but it is putting some weight on the joint over there but it's handling it fine because we have our two brackets tightened up on the side of the wheelbase and yeah no issues there but yeah i think if i'm gonna use this i'm gonna put the plastic piece i gotta take the protective plastic off of it it comes with this that's that dull stuff you see there so this peels off and i think i would have this sitting here like this would be better for my particular use and to attach a keyboard to this i use wireless keyboard i just put a piece of a strip of velcro because the wireless keyboards don't weigh very much anyway and just kind of stick it on there and you're good to go it won't go anywhere so there it is the keyboard assembly is now on and yeah it's something that's that i would recommend that you get as far as having a cockpit a keyboard and a mouse tray is very important for putting your trackball on so in a matter of fact we'll get to the mouse tray next so now we're ready to put our mouse pad on and our mouse plate tray what do you want to call it now this is two pieces of aluminum that are sandwiching some it feels like maybe delrin or something stiff there's no flex to this so it's a nice stiffness to it and a very simple thing we're going to be doing here obviously we have some countersunk holes here and you can see the shiny aluminum bits where the countersunk holes are we'll be putting our 5 16ths flathead bolts in there like that a couple of t-nuts on the bottom and put it in the channel wherever you want to have your mouse or trackball i use a trackball so you can still use a mouse on this but i like the trackball because it takes up a little bit more room than a mouse but it's easier to use and try to move the mouse around but hey whatever you want to use just go ahead and stick it on the top of this so i have the mouse pad attached to the cuphead now and yeah very simple thing couple of t-nuts we got our flat heads in there so it's not sticking up anywhere very nice and i put it down on the bottom piece because if you want to put a shifter or handbrake or something on the top rail then yeah you probably don't want it hanging off there anywhere and yeah it's just going to work down there i have it set up similarly on one of my other comp hits that i just kind of when you're from my seating position i can still reach down and get to my track ball and set up my lap and use it if i need it but if you don't run anything up here then obviously you can put your mouse tray up there so then that would work perfectly all right so we have the end caps installed everywhere we have them on the back of the shifter here we have them down there on the big pieces of profiles on our seat mounting profiles and of course up here on the top and we don't need them in the front because we have that bracket that fascia if you will going across the front of those profiles there so don't really need it there and yeah i think it looks okay you know i'm not sure about the white on black i'm more sure about it now after the build than i was during the build or when i was first looking at it i wasn't sure just how i would like it but again this is totally subjective it depends on what you're looking for in this you know in the right room this might be exactly what somebody wants so yeah it's very nice coding on this everything turned out well this thing is a super heavy duty rig this asr-6 it's very massive in weight and of course with that comes stiffness and yeah you you can't ask for much more as far as stiffness comes from this cockpit but we'll talk a little bit more about that in part two when i'm actually testing it with a seat on it some wheel attached of course pedals and we're driving it and we'll be able to tell more about how it feels as far as stiffness and just performance overall for the sim simracer and you remember this is a part one video of this the review that i'm doing on this asr-6 so there will be a part two called the setup this one's called the build obviously because we're building it and yeah we'll just go ahead and get to the final thoughts final thoughts on the asr-6 aluminum profile cockpit from the guys that advanced sim racing this is part one called the build of a two-part review series in part two i will be adding sim racing gear to the asr-6 and then testing it in real world conditions the first thing you notice when you start taking the parts out of the shipping boxes is the very nicely done white powder coating on the profiles they have a nice gloss finish and i couldn't find any defects in that finish add the black brackets for support pieces and you have the ultimate in color contrast which i think makes the lines of this cockpit stand out more than others asr decided to go with a heavy version of the aluminum profile here with no holes in the profile's channel walls like in the light and ultra light types of profiles which gives the asr-6 more mass which for me is a good thing once constructed this is as heavy and solid a cockpit that anyone would ever want i think this kit was complete with all parts and fasteners present building the asr-6 is a pretty straightforward process if you are handy with a screwdriver you should be able to build this unit all mounting brackets are made from steel plate that has a nice black pebble grain finish to it brackets made from steel will have a very noticeable increase in its mass when compared to the same brackets made from aluminum plate so there will be some areas of the build process that would be easier if you have a second set of hands to help you out really not much to complain about with the asr-6 kit i did have to use a clamp to get the front end of the 50 inch side profiles lined up properly to fit the front connecting plate but that wasn't the first time i have had to do this when building with longer aluminum profiles all these parts come together to give a very solid cockpit result that should be a great base to sim race from but i won't be able to comment on that until after i have put some miles on it and testing which i will do in part two of the two-part video series called the setup i'm barry rowland thanks again for watching the simracing garage channel don't forget to hit the subscribe button and if you would like to help support what i do here at the srg visit my website at simracinggarage.com

Channel: Sim Racing Garage

Views: 30,705

Keywords: sim racing garage, sim racing, racing, assetto corsa, iracing, sim racing cockpit, gaming, fanatec, simulator, online racing, racing simulator, simracing, forza, rfactor, thrustmaster, racing wheel, simulation, vr, f1, gran turismo, shifter, simxperience, HPP, Heusinkveld, Sim Lab, Logitech, racing pedals, motion simulator, PS4, XBOX, Xero Play, RF2, computer racing, IMSA, WEC, gamer, nascar, scca, triple monitor, oculus, racing seat, sparco, momo, D-BOX, bodnar

Id: deVHsbr0toQ

Length: 64min 37sec (3877 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 06 2020