Further changes and updates to the glare and the MIP with painting well underway. Here you can see the glarewings painted black with my custom switch plate installed on the captains side. Obviously I wouldn’t bother making a full switch plate for the FO side as its a single seat cockpit, instead I printed a sticker version for aesthetics. The dimmer on the real aircraft adjusts the Map light however I’m using it to dim the MIP and glareshield lighting. The bottom photos also show the fully installed MIP and top cover.
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Of course changes had to be made to my glareshield once I decided to go with a single seat cockpit design. I trimmed down the glareshield wings and moved them in a little to cater for a single EFIS, MCP and the Display Select Panel (DSP). The DSP was custom ordered from Manolo over at Hispapanels who painted it in Boeing Grey for me. I also picked up a series of center pedestal panels while I was at it.
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The glareshield was designed on the 777 and posed a particular problem in that the end wings are sculpted quite sleek with mutli layers at different angles. After a bit of sketching I came up with a template for the 3 layers that would make up each wing. I then transferred the sketch onto a 6mm piece of MDF to be used as a template. This template was carefully sculpted then stuck onto a piece of 16mm MDF which would form one of the three layers. This was then roughly cut around the outside with a jigsaw before taking to it with the router. The 6mm template was stuck onto the 16mm MDF using thin double sided tape and used as a template to guide the router. 3 templates formed the 3 x 16mm layers to make up the total thickness and unique shape of the wings. The glareshield base is made out of 9mm MDF with pine supports to add rigidity. Slots are routed along the MIP line for installation of strip LED lighting that will give downward lighting of the avionics panels.
An important function of the glareshield is the housing of the Mode Control Panel (MCP) and Electronic Flight Instrument System (EFIS) controllers. Mine is from Opencockpits and provides perfect functionality and very accurate control of all autopilot functions of all aircraft and with some tweaking of the SIOC/Sim-A config files it can be made to perform exactly like the 777 MCP. As the OC version doesn’t come with backlighting I found a way to retrofit lighting and therefore solve the problem. You can download the tutorial for this from the sidebar.
Here is the MCP in action:
Fast Tube by Casper