Firstly my thanks have to go to Bruce May and Bill Spencer for the inspiration and confidence to tackle this project. The majority of this project was made from materials laying around in my garage left over from previous projects of mine. I am a D.I.Y. enthusiast, a modeler, and a Red Baron II addict. I am also fortunate to have a large variety of left over bits and pieces in my garage to choose from.

Most of the wood is 12 mm custom wood. The post for the controller is made from old Hoover vacuum cleaner aluminium extension tubes. This was inserted as a force fit into two layers of 12mm custom wood. This was then bolted to the pedal baseboard using a coach bolt and wing nut.

The cover for the 100k linear pot was made from the plastic lid for a can of CRC. The aluminium 12mm 'U' channel was a left over from my model yacht and came from my local hardware store.

The pedals are on rollers that were made from some 12mm O/D fiberglass rod, cut and drilled on a friend's lathe. These were fitted onto some heavy gauge piano wire as axles which were anchored into the base plates of the pedals by cutting a groove into the custom wood and clamping them into place with some small plates made from scrap metal. The plates were held into place using small wood screws. I have not fitted the brake bits and pieces as yet, they may come later, but provision has been made for them.

The yellow plate in the central picture is an indexing plate to enable me to tell where central rudder is. The material was a left over piece of 2mm fiberglass sheet. The indexing is achieved by using a spring loaded ball catch from an old cupboard door dropping into a hole in the plate.

The controller, Genius F-23, was modified by adding a socket at the rear, picture 3, so that when the plug on the cable from the 100k rudder pot is inserted, it transfers the connection from the internal pot. When the plug is removed the internal pot takes over again. The controller platform, 3mm custom wood, is clamped to the front of the slide out keyboard tray using two small G clamps, the red bits in pictures 1 and 3. A final touch of wood stain just to smarten things up a bit and you are all set to fly.

For storage purposes, the whole unit breaks down easily and quickly, and is quite compact. Should anyone be interested enough, I am willing to supply any further details or pictures. Just let me know what you need at rodpatt@paradise.net.nz.

It really wasn't as difficult as I thought originally to make these pedals, apart from the making of the rollers, only requires some basic woodworking skills. The only really tricky bit is the extension socket on the controller but even that is really just a change over switch! Have fun.

Rod Patterson
rodpatt@paradise.net.nz