Step-by-Step DIY Cockpit Roof Build for Sim Racing IMMERSION

[Music] [Music] in this video i'm going to show you the steps i took and the material i used to build this roof for my sim racing cockpit this addition to my rig has created a whole new level of immersion for me it provides full coverage blocking out light and any distractions from your room as well as bringing your eyes and attention more in focus with the game and the road it creates the illusion of sitting in an actual car and has overall made my experience of racing even more immersive and fun i have seen other sim racers create canopies above their monitors to help block out the top of the review which can work really well and makes it easier getting in and out but i wanted to take this a step further and come up with a different solution the best way i found to do this was building a cockpit roof that sits on top of my monitors with the added support of a diy mounting system to my monitor stand allowing the roof to pivot up and down for getting in and out when i began the planning for this project i had five goals one was to keep it as simple as possible two it had to look as clean as possible and it was important to me that it blended with the rest of my setup three it had to be relatively inexpensive or at least less than a hundred dollars four it had to be easily removable for storage or when i don't want to use it and lastly it had to be durable and solid i want it to hold up over time and not look bad or worn out after a few months or years okay for this next part i'm going to walk you through the steps i took to create this now since i did not record videos when i made this at the time this was before i started the channel i'm going to do my best to still explain all the steps in detail and use some photos that i took along the way when i put this together one thing i just want to mention is the roof itself should work with any triple monitor setup but if you choose to mount this like i did to my monitor stand this is where things may differ quite a bit for you as the items or application may be slightly different depending on what you have but if you apply the same principles you may be able to come up with a great solution for your specific monitor stand or rig my hope is that this video at least give you a good baseline and some ideas to build upon and inspire you to create the perfect roof for your needs okay let's talk about material and tools that you're going to need for this project let's start with the materials first okay so the first thing you're gonna need is some mdf board i found this was the best option i went with a two by four quarter inch thick you could go with a different thickness but keep in mind that if you go too thin the board is going to warp and bend very easily but if you go too thick it's going to be really heavy and make removing it on and off harder and potentially put too much weight on your monitor stand so find what works for you make sure the size has good coverage across your three monitors it's okay if there's extra material because we're gonna end up cutting that in the next steps anyways something i should mention is that i left a bit of space towards my seat for my head you'll want to make sure you do this according to where how you sit and your height okay the next piece of material is what you're going to use to cover your board now you do have two options here i went the route of using an automotive vinyl wrap but you could also i would think paint this board i'm gonna leave a link in the description on a guide on how to paint mdf you could do it that way i just prefer the look of the the vinyl i wanted to give it a more of a racing and automotive feel so to speak so there's a lot of options out there but i'll put a link to what worked for me i purchased a automotive self-adhesive vinyl from amazon and i've had no issues with adhesion so far and i've had this on the board for a few months now so i'll leave a couple links on that but the decisions up to you ultimately in the end [Music] now the next step if you are deciding to create a mounting system to mount this to your cockpit or to your monitor stand like i said you could just have the roof stand alone have it sit on top but ideally you'd want to have it attached to something on your rig so i'm gonna show you what i used these are basically designed to be sound bar mounts for a wall mounted tv but i found that they actually in design worked really well for what i was trying to do here because of the owl brackets that are included allow me to bolt those to the roof and then the arms are able to reach out and then attach to my monitor stand and they also have the ability you can unscrew this knob and adjust the angle of uh of those mounts so it actually just worked out really perfect for what i needed so i'll include a link below please use my affiliate link it helps the channel and that will direct you to these soundbar mounts would i which i believe are still available as of making this video today also i forgot to mention you're gonna need two sets of these that's important okay so some of the last sort of smaller things that you're going to need here what i used is some weather stripping and the reason i use this is that when you have this mounted on top of the monitors they may not stand you know it may not sit perfectly flush so you might have little gaps of light at the top of the monitor where it meets the roof so i found the best solution for this was to take some basically like a weather sealant foam tape and just run that along the bottom on the outside of your monitors on the bottom of the roof and so it kind of just snugly then allows the roof to fit onto the monitors when they're at your correct angle that you want and then but it covers that that light so then there's no light coming through and that really helps keeping that immersion and everything the next thing and this is optional right like like i said with this is what's cool about this roof is you can customize this to your liking so you know you can use other pieces of vinyl to create some striping or delivery you can put you know i put manufacturer decals on mine i went with some uh nardo gray vinyl that i found i was trying to kind of recreate my inspiration was from the new porsche 911 gt3r so i use some red tape in the center i mean you can go crazy there's gold chrome if you're into that like really the possibilities here are endless and you know this is where i encourage you to use your creativity okay let's talk about the tools you're going to need and then we're going to go into the actual build steps so a few of the simple tools that you're going to need are a sharp knife like an exacto knife or box cutting knife something that's it's got to be very sharp and thin uh a smaller x-acto knife is probably best this is going to be used for trimming vinyl then you're going to need a tape measure obviously to do your measurements i also suggest a big level or ruler as well for when you're planning out your cuts you're gonna need some crazy glue that's only specifically for that weather stripping i found that was the best way to attach it but you could use double-sided tape or get a weather stripping that has a really good adhesive on it mine didn't have a great adhesive then you're going to need a squeegee for the vinyl you can purchase one usually when you purchase the vinyl on amazon i just got this blue one you can use a credit card too but i find it works better if you cover the card with something soft you don't want to be running something hard along the vinyl it could damage it then you're gonna need some scissors for cutting the vinyl obviously and then some tools you're going to need when you're actually attaching mounts you'll need some good set of ratchets some screwdrivers different bits etc okay so now for some of the the bigger the fun stuff the power tools you're gonna need not a whole lot here hopefully you have some of these lying around or i'm sure you have a relative or friend you can borrow one from i had to borrow a circular saw for my dad because i did not have one circular saw you're gonna need or or some sort of saw you may be more knowledgeable of this and have a better tool you just need something you can cut the board you know straight at a good good line clean cut that's what you're looking for i used a circular saw and was just went very carefully slowly was patient it turned out fine then the next thing you're going to want to have and this is not necessarily required but i used like a detail sander and this was just for going around the edges after the cut and i also found it looked nicer in terms of rounding the corners around the board with one of those if you could do it manually it might take a long time but some sort of sanding unit i recommend it in terms of finishing off after you cut the board okay guys i almost forgot to mention please please please be safe here if you're not familiar with using a power saw or tools get some help get some advice don't be stupid that's all okay now we're gonna get ready to build our cockpit roof first step what i call the planning getting your measurements done figuring out how everything's going to work what worked for me is i took the board put it on top of the rig figure out exactly where i want it to end up sitting look at if you're using the mounts i'm using or if you whatever you decide to do for mounting try to get those in relative to position where you want them just to make sure everything lines up everything is where you want it to be then what i did is trace out the lines to kind of go in line with the angle of the monitors because i wanted it to fit nicely on top and cut you know follow the same shape of my triple set up right so you'll take your measuring tape or your ruler and basically map out the lines in which you need to cut the board down by simple enough okay so if i had recorded this when i was actually making this roof a few months ago there'd be a cool video of me in my garage looking professional cutting this piece of wood but we don't have that so i'm assuming you went out and did that and now your roof should look something like this if you went the same design route that i did okay guys sorry again i also don't have a video of me looking cool doing vinyl wrap for the first time on this board because i made this a few months ago before the channel and didn't think to record it but anyhow i'm not gonna go into the actual application of vinyl there's a ton of way better guides on youtube on the internet on how to actually apply vinyl if you're not familiar with it it's very easy it's literally a matter of sticking it on into the center of the board and then spreading it out across to get the air out with your squeegee but like i said if you want some help with this look for a vinyl guide they could be applying vinyl to a car or anything else the principles really are the same and this is probably the easiest because you're going right on a flat surface so it's going to be really easy for you i had no issues doing this one thing to note you're going to want to use maybe a hair dryer just to heat up the vinyl a little bit it helps with you know getting the air out as well as just getting it to adhere where you want it now it vinyl is very forgiving so if you make a mistake don't worry don't panic just slow down you can take it off put it back on it's fairly malleable um and you should have some extra on the roll just in case you make a mistake it's not the end of the world but like i said look for a vinyl guide it helped me it will help you so in the end your board should look like this if you've done this the same way i did and we're ready for the next step okay guys so all the hard stuff is done honestly it gets much easier from here um so the next part is you know mounting how we gonna mount this right so if you're using the type of idea that i went with or similar you're gonna need to drill holes through the roof so that you can mount those bolts through and then tighten them i found that that's the best way to keep it intact without having to like drill a screw a screw in because honestly eventually that screw is going to come loose i felt that a bolt system going through a hole through the roof is going to keep it most secure honestly you don't see the bolt heads uh underneath the roof in retrospect i actually probably should have flipped it so that i had the washers on the top but i thought it would look better with the bolt head on the top that's up to you how you do it just make sure you position your mounts where they're gonna need to be and then mark those holes you may need to use a colored marker in this case if your roof is black and then get your drill bit make sure your drill bit is you know just a little bit bigger than the bolts that you're going to use i used m6 by 20 bolts found that that was the right length and the right thickness for this project and then you're basically gonna mark those holes then get your drill out drill through those holes again i don't have a video of this i'm sorry but i think you get the idea and then position your mounts uh i drilled these at a few different points just to make sure that they're held together now i know you're asking you see those additional mounting bars that i put on the roof that i didn't include in the material at the beginning of video now i decided to just add those because i had some of these old they're basically tv mount bars and i just wanted to put those there to add some additional support i actually don't think they're necessary i think you'll be fine without it but if you wanted to just put some sort of maybe like a mending plate or a metal trim piece that has holes i leave that up to you but you should be okay with just the soundbar mount but like i said if you want additional support you're going to need to find something there whether purchase it look around your house if you have these tv bar sound mounts uh not samara but tv mounts they work great so you can see how i just kind of put holes and drilled those through and then attach them with the with the same bolts okay so a little bonus step here guys you may be wondering what are these sort of black bars just below my roof now these are made by philips hue these are called the hue play bar and you may have seen some other videos on youtube where i believe boosted media did one of the first videos with how to sync uh in-game lighting with these hue but with these hue lights so that's what i use these for and that's a whole other video a whole nother guide i'm not going to go into that setup but i found a way to mount these and integrate these into the roof and angle them in a way that there's not the glare is not too bad on the screen so i will include a link in the description to these mounts they're actually led light bar mounts for like a jeep or an off-road vehicle and they worked out perfect for this because there's a hole in the back of the play bar that you can mount the stands that come with it but instead i use that hole to then mount it to this little mounting bracket which then has the same size hole as the bolts that i was using to attach my mounts for the roof so everything just kind of went through and i attached them together where you can see on that last bolt so if you have hue play bars already and you're wondering like how am i going to use these now that i have a roof this is a solution that i came up with not saying it's the best solution but it's the solution i came up with so if you have any questions let me know okay so this is really the final step this is the most fun part and that's customization now it's up to you if you are super minimal you want to keep things clean just go with one surface one paint one vinyl it's gonna look mint but i kind of just decided to customize mine a little bit just have some fun with it so i did this extra striping with some extra pieces of vinyl got some manufacturer decals that i ordered online as well so just kind of you know trying to make it look like a porsche race car i think it looks kind of cool in my opinion i'm not sure i may take it off but for now i think it looks great for you you can customize this any any way you want if you're a ferrari guy or a girl or a lamborghini fan you could change the whole theme of this right so it's it's this is the fun part for you guys okay so um that's really it guys now so one thing i just want to make note i know this guide is not perfect because you know a lot of this is specific to my setup my monitor stand i get that my intention really here was to give you guys a baseline or just give you some inspiration to take this and do it completely different i'm sure somebody is going to come up with a way better idea than i did i'm sure there's somebody out there that has a better solution a lot of people on facebook when i posted this for the first time shared with me some of their roof ideas and they looked amazing honestly you know what there's a million different ways you could probably go about this my hope was that if you haven't thought about this or not sure how to start maybe this video helps you so if it does i'm happy for that if you have any comments or questions please reach out in the comments i would be happy to respond directly to you if there's something that's not clear to you or you need help and especially i would love to see your finished projects uh if you do take on a project like this the best place to do that is to go to my facebook page the simracing den and share your setup there we have a group set up called the simracing setups you could share any of your setup photos there i would love to see what you guys come up with i'm sure there's going to be some really creative roofs out there so i think that covers everything i know this was a longer one but i hope that you enjoyed it i hope that i was clear enough and i encourage you to try this project and until the next one stay safe and happy racing out there [Music] you

Channel: The SimRacing Den

Views: 25,076

Keywords: sim racing, setup wars, gaming setup, sim racing setup, sim racing setups, sim rig setup, sim rig, fanatec, driving games, acc, iracing, assetto corsa, desk setup, gaming, simulation, sim games, drifting, carx, moza, thurstmaster, sim cockpit, triple monitor, motorsport, raceroom, dirt, vr, projectscars2, cubecontrols, racingsimulator, erposrts, formulaone, virtualreality, hobby, rfactor, simrig, sim racing roof, DIY, canopy, sim racing canopy, flight simulator, immersive, immersion, racing, esports, forza

Id: rw5uAwS1pws

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 12 2022