Making Flight Sim Panels with my eBay Laser

hi everyone welcome to the channel again today I'm going to tell you how to turn something like that into something like that [Music] but there's what will that now is the fuel panel that I've designed in cold draw as you can see it's three major pieces that back piece there is made of black three millimeter acrylic you can see that the back piece has three momet holes placed in it for backlighting LEDs the middle is an opaque white three millimeter acrylic it's only purpose is to defuse those LEDs so you don't get hotspots in all the text and then the front panel is the one that gets painted black and obviously all the text gets um all the text gets engraved into it and then these lines that those three there are clear plastic obviously on glass and then those are just rings to keep the glass in place so this is obviously for the fuel the hydraulic gauges and fuel gauges will be in these large holes that I'm cutting into them and then they just get pressed fit in the front I want to take you through the gauges themselves because they're a little bit more complicated to make than this but anyway this is just going to be a main panel so the way I do it is I just open up a one a blank one called it untitled now my laser bed is only small so I can only cut all of this at once so we'll do the black one first basically I'll copy that I paste it into I'm called untitled and then I save that as a DXF so you just go save as DXF yes so I basically use one corner I'm titled as my workspace then all I do is open up my laser CAD software this is laser code version seven point seven eight point one zero so this runs my upgraded Chinese k40 laser I just import that DXF file that I saved there it is my rotate it 90 degrees and there we go these are the acrylics that I use I just get them in a4 sheets because it fits my laser easily that's the front panel you can see it's a solid white two millimeter thick piece this is for the middle panel it's a pack white you can see it sort of diffuses light and the back piece is just solid black alright that's running the wiser okay so here's a quick overview of the laser setup it's a cheap Chinese k40 that I've upgraded myself it's got a light object is the company that sells these it's a digital signal processor so it's heaps better than the cheap Chinese software that's what runs that laser kit laser CAD program I've also put an air assist pump on it and if I used to have a I did actually put a z-axis table so I was powered but I removed it because it made my bed smaller and I realize that I'm only ever cutting the same sort of plastic anyway so I might as well have it at a fixed height I've also got the laser tube you can see there's a bit of a PVC housing so the laser is bigger than fits in the machine but it just cuts stuff like a hot knife through butter now pullings taken care of by that modified S key in there well there's that said table I was talking about got some holes in it and a computer water pump if it's pumping um the water through it I'm one of the temperatures with a with a sensor in there you can see that's 14 point for the moment which is sweet in the summer months so I just fill that with ice and one of the temperatures so it doesn't get too hot exhaust goes out the back there through that duct taped up the vent to a fan or more alright so the laser is now powered up so these the software knows that it's there I can just read the current position tells me where the laser head is in the machine so what'd I just do then is move the part so I remove the panel to where the laser head is and that means up it's safer material so rather than having this ko data set for a day for part I can probably squeeze two panels out of one piece of a4 plastic so all I have to do now is push download it will ask me all the settings download it to the machine all I have to do now is push start there or start on the machine and it will run it all right so we're at the machine I'll just quickly push the test button and make sure that it's gonna fit on the plastic which it will turn on the air pump all right so it's finished see that took 1 minute and 45 seconds to cut that okay that's what you end up that's the back of the fuel gauge Ola mocks are that just rescued from the cutting process and so on so I clean it up it'll be smooth but I'll tighten back block anyone let's do the next petal [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so to do the front panel I'm cutting out on the white and basically I'll cut it out of the white I'll glue it to that middle panel paint the whole thing black then I'll put it in the laser engraver so I'm not engraving now so I'll just turn off the engraving layer and I will do the same thing I've done with all one's copy it paste it into my workspace yeah just right click paste Chuck it there so go to the DXF you put it to the laser and cut it [Music] on the front panel okay so I'm done with the laser and this is the end result this is the main three parts of each panel and the entire cockpit this is the rear one that the switches LEDs everything gets bolted to or mounted in this is just a light diffusing panel and this is a the front panel which will be painted black and then engraved with the text so these two here get glued together with a acrylic cement so it actually met melts the acrylic and fuses it together so it'll be one solid strong piece and then that one would get put on there some what I'll do now is I'll just give them a quick brush overall with sandpaper and I'll glue these two together I use this it's a solvent cement so like I said it it melts the plastic and fuses the two together once they're glued you'll never get them apart it's like having the one side piece of plastic I use the water thin stuff and I'll just use a syringe and basically pull it on then pull it on that one put that on move it around and get it in the right spot and leave it it's really fast setting it'll take probably two minutes until it's solid I won't video tape it though because it's not very good stuff this one healthy so I need to Club up and I do okay so here's the front and the middle panel glued together and our one solid piece here's the back panel and that will get bolted on with m4 screws like that there's one more step I take before I get to focus before I get to painting this and engraving it and that is drilling the back of it okay so the LED backlights are you the LEDs are used for backlighting of these and they get mounted from the rear of this panel and you can see that they will stick out a little bit there so I just need to drill a pocket into the back of the white one into the back of that diffusing panel which also gives you a nice even light spread now I was previously engraving that in the laser but it just takes so long and it's just so much easier to screw these together and then run a three mil drill bit really softly in the back of them it's just so much easy to do that [Music] all right so I'm just gonna run a bit of cardboard that I always use the spray paint stuff it's just held on there with some double-sided tape I also remember to mask up the bit that I don't want painting it on that's where the knob backlights the paint I use is this ordinary paint yet in the hardware store I learn very early on to use good quality paint so spend the extra money and get a good brand the ones you get that cost like a dollar a can will not give you a good result and the they don't lays well at all this is the best I've used so far okay so here's the top panel painted four coats of that spray paint and it's all good to go doesn't matter that it's not perfect on the back obviously because none of that will be seen it also doesn't matter it's not perfect about around the part that I've left the knob the backlight because then that will be seen so what it's time to do now is to engrave it and I'll show you how I do that okay so to prepare the laser for engraving instead of cutting I have lowered the bed it's not power and obviously I just undo four bolts on the side here and then I've got some little marks on the pot on the legs that show me where to drop it so I've dropped it about five mil the reason I drop it for engraving is because I'll put this scrap bit of MDF on there which I will take down so it doesn't move and you can see I've used it for a whole bunch of different panels this bit of scrap basically all I do is very lightly cut out the outline of the panel so I've got a reference point then I put the panel down in that outline so I know it's exactly in the right spot and then I run the engraving program this just gets held down with masking tape and then I doubles use double sided tape to hold the panel straight so it doesn't move when the laser is moving so I will set that up now alright so here we are in laser CAD you can see I've got the top of a fuel panel laid out where I want everything if you look over here you can see all the colors are doing it and engrave at 280 powers 15 and I've got the outside which will be the outline of where the panel has to sit as a cut layer it's really fast because I'm not looking to cut through the wood I just want to mark it so I know where to lay the panel out so I'll just turn off all these for now and I'll get it to just do the cut on the machine I'll download that and I'll head over to the machine and run that that should just give me the outline on the MDF I said obviously it looks like a massive mess right now because there's so many lines but you'll see once you actually put the panel down in the right spot you can work out which lines are for that panel and it's pretty easy so I can just find where the outline is get it in the right spot I'll put some double-sided tape on it now I know that the machine knows where the panel is sitting so all I have to do is run the engrave and it will be graving into the panel okay so now that the panel is in the machine and is taped down in the right spot I will just turn off the outside cut and turn on Orlean graves and I'll run it [Music] okay so there it is complete the front panel anyway come into the laser I'm pretty happy with how it looks what I'm going to do now is solder up the back light circuit basically there's a three mil minute sorry three millimeter LED in each of these little holes I have them in groups of three so there's three in series with one resistor and then all of those are parallel okay so here it is with the back light complete I have solved it a little up as you can see it's very very simple it's just a three millimeter green LEDs all soldered up together and then I just use these kind of dew point connectors to connect it to the power supply which will be on the same back lighting circuit with the dimmer in the cockpit you can see it all works nice and easy so what I'm going to do now is just cover the back of the panel with some self-adhesive vinyl basically put that down like that hit it with a heat gun so it's some stuck on there and it will insulate the back of the panel so there'll be no exposed wiring that could fail on other cables in the pit and it will keep the LEDs in place without me needing to glue them or bolt them in at all so I'll do that now and then the panel is pretty much complete okay so here's the rear of the back panel you can see that I've put the vinyl over the LED backlight circuit and you can see here the LEDs are at the front here that means there's basically I'll turn it on there's almost no bleed at the back so you don't get especially in panels like this where there's large gauges in the middle where you don't get any of this green backlighting bleeding into those gauges that you can see from the front you can see how bright they are perfect alright now all we're going to do is bolt it together this panel is really easy all it's got on it is one push button switch and one eighth position rotary switch and the rest is all the gauge I'll do I'll do a video on the gauges later because they're a little bit more complicated than this right so there it is sort of illuminated with the knob you can see it's pretty bright so the cameras and pick it up you can see an arrow on its own illuminates and there's a quick test of the backlight on that fuel gauge looks pretty cool I reckon [Music]

Channel: The Warthog Project

Views: 410,584

Keywords: simulator, dcsworld, warthog, laser, k40, flight simulator, home cockpit, a10c

Id: GWwiDnhjQlo

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 22 2018