Paint used for various components
Building tips:
How I make my Korry switches:
I ordered a plexiglas (2 m in lenght) bar cut in 80 cubes of 2cm x 2cm x2cm.
I use push buttons which need 3 mm drilled holes in the centre of the cube to fit. (use some sort of guidance!!)
The switches fit very well,....no glue needed.
Well, we want to make korries so we need holes for two 5 mm leds
No we end up with 3 holes in the back of our plexiglass cube.
Leds produce a lot of light so we will need some sort of separation of the 2 lightbundles. Just cut a groove in the middle of the cube.
(be sure to use some sort of guidance!)
And now we end up with this,.....I only screwed up one piece,.... cut it in 2 pieces accidentally!!
Fill the groove with pieces of simple cardboard.
Cut off the carboardedges and now we have a nice separation of led-bundles.
It costed me the whole afternoon but now there are over 50 korries waiting for final assembly.
Prototype as seen from the lateral, 2 leds already assembled.

(I use standard 330 ohm resistance but you may need to experiment for best results)
Prototype with printed legend assembled on the front, looks good don't you think??

I designed the legends myself using real boeing fonts in Adobe Illustrator and will have all boeing 767 announciators and korry-legens printed commercially (about 30 euros for a complete 767 set ) on a thin lexan sheet for easy handling.
white leds
art. nr. 156241
orange leds
art. nr. 185030
momentary pushbutton
order code: 8701
plexiglas bar
2m x 2cm x 2cm
HSS spiral drills
2,9 mm - 3 mm - 4,9 mm - 5 mm
-
list of 'Korry' materials:
Fonts used for Boeing panels:
You can find these fonts here !!

component:
color:
grey knobs
Sigma standaard nieuw 0027-06 zijdeglans
boeing brown panels
 S 6010-Y50R BMT Colourconcept (FL Colors Zijdeglans)
How to copy your small components, 'working with a mould':
list of 'mould' materials:
Siliconenrubber PS 81020  /  5% Harder PS 81020
2 components PU Giethars PS 115
To make a mould you need silicone rubber ( 2 components: rubber + harder)
Mix the 2 components (1 : 0,05 mixture). Put the component to copy in the mould and fill with the silicone rubber mixture. After 24 hours you can remove the original and the mould is ready for use.
For making copies you will need resin. Mix the 2 components (1 : 1). Now you have 3 minutes to fill up the mould, after that the resin will harden.
After 15 minutes you can safely remove the copied component,...... .wow,....looks 100% like the original!
Now it's time for the final touch, paint the component in the color of your choice. I make a small groove in the original knob which enables easy attachment of the nice looking stripe (printed on self attaching paper). Then finish with a top layer of transparant paint.
(By the way, I got the idea from a modeltrain builders site !!)
You need to paint the sides of the cubes black to block the light.
How I make my legends for annunciators:  'silk screen printing as an alternative"
I designed my legends in Adobe illustrator. Since I don't have a CNC machine or laser engraving possibilities I have been looking for an alternative. Now I have my legends printed on a thin Lexan-sheet (polycarbonate). With U.V.-silk screen printing (zeefdruk in Dutch) it's possible to apply four layers of ink. This totally blocks the light of the led's and still gives very sharp legends.
The Lexan sheet thickness is only 0,175 mm. Very easy to handle and still very strong material. I use a self adhesive backlayer for easy attachment.
I put the legends on another transparant backlayer before attaching it to the plexiglass Korry cubes.
The results are amazing, absolutely no light leakage. In real they even look better, it's hard to make photographs using these strong leds.
Many thanks to the 'Interscreen' team for helping me out with the excellent silk-screen-printing' technique !!
My Level D 767 legend design
silk screen printing done by:
list of 'legend' materials:
Started overhead panel design........
Now all my knobs, korries and annunciators are ready I need to make a nice overhead panel to fit all components in.
I started the design based on the real 767 panel.



TO BE CONTINUED!!!
Made my final overhead-prototype
Before I start building the final overhead-design I made the last prototype this afternoon. Prototypes give you the opportunity to rule out all possible pitfalls. My best advice regarding cockpit-building:

"ALWAYS USE PROTOTYPES",....a real time saver !!

As mentioned before I don't have a CNC machine or laser-engraver so I have to make panels manually. I use 3 layers,......1 top layer is a printout of the frontplate attached on a 0,5 mm plastic sheet. You can easily cut out al openings with a stanley knife. The middle layer and the backlayer (switch-holder) are  made of 5 mm plexiglass.
Use the right tools to get all openings perfectly aligned!!
Next step is to assemble the layers, the switches (and rotaries) and the korries. My design was almost perfect, they fit all nicely immediately!

Be aware that the shown korry-legends are dummies for the time being! The duct pressure wil be shown digitally on 8 segment displays behind the panel.
The final result matches the primary design as shown above for 100%.

I couldn't wait longer and fitted one real korry in the middle, look at the result,......the panel comes alive!!

Of course still a lot of work to do before the complete 767 overhead will be finished but now I know I'm on the right path..............


TO BE CONTINUED!!!!!
Made a demonstration panel for the coming Dutch FS weekend at Lelystad
4 and 5 november the dutch flightsim-community will meet at Lelystad airport for the yearly FS weekend.

Of course I wanted to show and share my building techniques but my overhead is not ready yet. So I decided to make a small demonstration panel on batteries for this special occasion.

The result is shown below.
Safeline Throttle recycling intermezzo: " give your safeline a second life "
I bought a safeline throttle quadrant years ago, very expensive but in those days a superb piece of hardware for flightsimulator freaks. Unfortunately this throttle still uses a serial port connection instead of USB and we haven't heard from the Safeline company for a long time. You can't get any software or firmware updates anymore at the moment. Allthough it could still be used in FS2002 and FS2004 there is not much flexibility in programming facilitities. I heard, but I'm not sure, that implementation in FSX will be even harder.
I have been looking for a commercial 767 throttle for a long time but the only option at the moment is the goflight throttle, which is useful but in my opinion quite expensive for what you get. The other option is building a complete throttle yourself, but the most difficult part is the lever-potmeter mechanism. Therefore I started removing screws from the safeline panel and guess what:  ' It turned out very easy to remove the nicely build lever-potmeter-mechanism within this safeline-model!! '
There are 2K potmeters inside, leaving the gear-mechanism intact they can easily be replaced with standard 10K ones. Then you can connect them via the IOCARDS USB axis card to FS9 and even FSX via Peter Dowsons FSUIPC. Now I need to make myself a nice new 767 housing with MDF for example. Also time-consuming but technically quite easy!This gives your safeline throttle a second life and is a relatively cheap solution.
Remember that it's not very easy to build a new throttle quadrant from scratch, the most difficult part is this lever-potmeter mechanism!!
I made a small test-platform and completely removed the 2 outer levers from the safeline mainboard. After connecting the levers directly to the nice and cheap IOCARDS USB axis card I managed to easily assign the level D 767  throttles, 7 flaps positions, spoilers en the steering tiller options via FSUIPC.



!!! TUTORIAL TO BE CONTINUED IN THE NEAR FUTURE !!!
Build my own 'steering tiller'
CNC milling machine
Unfortunately I haven't been able to make any significant progress in building my simulator last year. I had to give priority to my family and work. My cockpit is waiting patiently upstairs. Of course my final goal to get a full working 767 cockpit in my house still withstands. I plan to give the project a new impulse by bying myself a CNC milling machine in the near future but this equipment is quite expensive and still time-consuming. My fellow-builder and good friend Hessel Oosten already started using such a machine and the potential of this technique is endless for serious builders (see example of a backlighted panel below made by Hessel Oosten).
Examples of commercially available CNC milling machines can be found here:

http://www.cnc-router-routers.com/

http://www.easgmbh.de/index.php

http://www.colinbus.com/English/Index.htm

http://www.team-haase.de/framesets/start.html

http://www.bzt-cnc.de/cnc_index.html

All machines have there pros and cons so I haven't made my final decision yet. The 767 builders community is still growing. If you build yourself a 767 as well you might want to check our Yahoo B767 home builders group here.
767 annunciator panel showcase
Below another example of a very nice panel build by Hessel Oosten. Almost a complete replica of the real 767 annunciator panel wich is situated on the overhead section. Panel cut with a CNC milling machine and annunciators constructed with the silkscreen printed labels and small plexiglass boxes as explained in the sections above.