AV-8B cockpit build

[Xpendable]

In the real Harrier, the seat has an electric motor for raising and lowering it. The seat does not move forwards or backwards, but the pedals are on a rail that can be moved closer or further away from the pilot. I'm thinking about making my pedals do the same. It would not be terribly hard to mount pedals to a slide rail and use a worm drive to move them back and forth. As for raising and lowering the seat... I might attempt that by buying an electric and seat lift mechanism if I can on for not too much money. I also have the actual seat back pad and head rest pad from a real AV-8B coming. It was actually used on a real Harrier but it in good condition. These snap on and off with snaps.

[Grifter]

That’s amazing. Must’ve been expensive to get the real padding? Why get an electric motor to raise or lower the seat? Just for authenticity’s sake?

[Xpendable]

I paid $100 total for both pads, so it was not too bad. I won't be able buy much real parts as they are mostly not existent or not publically available (and probably would not be affordable even if they were). Part of the fun is trying to recreate these things as best as I can. It won't be exact, but it will be close enough. Someone just posted prelimary designs and prototypes for a reproduction of the Harrier throttle that looks bad ass. I am hoping he releases the plans and 3d models because it looks really good.

[Xpendable]

I may have to ditch the motorized raising and lowering of the seat. There are not any easy, inexpensive solutions that I could find after a couple of hours of searching. It can be added later, though.

[Xpendable]

I've acquired the ejection seat back pad and head rest pad from a real AV-8B Harrier, complete with authentic USMC smells! I plan to use these on my ejection seat that I will be building next month.

[Trichome]

Very Cool!!!
Any history on those items? I would imagine being USMC flown in combat at somepoint?

[Xpendable]

Very Cool!!!
Any history on those items? I would imagine being USMC flown in combat at somepoint?

The only history I have is that they are from USMC Harriers and the reclamation tags are both from 1990. So they wouldn't have flown any later than that. The seat back was tagged June 7 and the other is August 13. That tells me that the 2 items could be from 2 different Harriers, although there's no way for me to know.

[PanzerMeyer]

I read somewhere that in general, US ejection seats had a lower survivability rating versus European designed ejection seats.

Well you know, it's the whole "lowest bidder wins" and all phenomenon going on.

[Xpendable]

Latest progress on the Harrier seat design. I figured out that I can use the DCS model viewer (modelViewer2 found in the bin directory) and load the cockpit model of the Harrier from DCS. This has been invaluable for reference, assuming Razbam made the Harrier model accurate. I discovered that I can export ortho views of the cockpit all in the same scale, and I'm now using these as the planar reference maps. I've had rework most of my model to fix a number of inaccuracies with regard to the Razbam model. Here's the reference photos I am using...

[Xpendable]

Let me try this again... last time I added my latest photo, it somehow included 3 pictures of somebody's table which I did not attach or upload. Bizarre forum bug!!!

[Xpendable]

I don't know what's going on... every time I tried to add an attachment, other people's images are appearing even though I only added 1 attachment. And I can't delete them (I get an access denied error). There's a serious bug here.

[Xpendable]

Now that I've got a decent draft of the ejection seat, I've started drafting up the rest of the cockpit. The partially canopy frame is just a test. I'm still learning FreeCAD as I go, and I'm testing different techniques for creating things.

Hopefully the forum software doesn't attach photos from other posts... there should only be 1 attachment here. Let's roll the dice and see what happens!

[Xpendable]

I am learning more and more about FreeCAD and it is a PITA. But hey, it's free! Crashes are pretty constant, and working with non-planar curves can be a challenge. Anyway, it took me over 24 hours of time just to model this glare shield. I'm talking thousands of clicks, many undos, many reloads from disk due to crashes, starting over on the glare shield about 18 times (the previous 17 times were apparently the wrong way and didn't work). I gotta take a break for a few days from this modeling before I work up the courage to continue working in FreeCAD. LOL...

[Bones]

Do you have a STP file of it? I'd like to have a look at it in AutoCAD Inventor.

If so, email it to me.

v6,
boNes

[Trichome]

Pretty impressive what you've done so far. Looks pretty cool. Don't try to over do it. Sometimes it helps to step away for abit.

[Xpendable]

I figured out that I have to redo the glare shield yet again, LOL. The order of operations resulted in the "eyebrow" parts being way smaller than they should be because they get sliced off when a cut an angle. Fixable by rebuilding it from the ground up with that angle already applied, and I know enough now that I could probably do it in an hour.

But now I've just discovered something that is totally a game changer. I found an unsupported plugin for Blender 2.79 (old version of Blender) that is able to import an EDM model from DCS. I first tried the plugin with the newer version of Blender (3.0.0) but it flat out does not work. I then installed Blender 2.79, and low and behold, I was able to import the cockpit. Blender does not know the relationship of the movable parts so they are scattered about, but that is okay. From Blender, I was able to export an .obj file, and then import the .obj file into FreeCAD. Each part is labeled and I can hide and unhide the parts, move them, etc. Now we are getting somewhere. The scale is way off, but I should be able to scale the parts and get that sorted. I can also move into position and rotate any of the movable parts if I so desire. I'll maybe use this as a "shell" to build my construction plans from. Like I said... This is a total game changer.

[Xpendable]

I've been able to scale the meshes I imported into FreeCAD and hid the meshes that contain the disconnected parts, which I don't need anyway. For some reason, the ejection seat is not in the imported meshes, but that's fine - I've already got the ejection seat mostly modelled. Here is my ejection seat model displayed with the imported meshes. This will greatly speed the construction geometry that I will be adding to the model.

[Xpendable]

I found the ejection seat from a separate EDM file in a different folder and used the Blender trick to get it imported. Here I've overlaid the ejection seat model from Razbam with the ejection seat I built up in FreeCAD (but hadn't yet finished). You can see I got pretty dang close! The red is the Razbam model.

[Xpendable]

And here's the Razbam ejection seat loaded in with the Razbam model (and my ejection seat hidden):

[Xpendable]

Hours and hours of more work. Still a long, long way to go. But getting there.