About

Maarten

My name is Maarten, living in East-Flanders. Born in the early 80’s and studied computer science. Happily married and father of two lovely children. Fascinated by technology, engineering… but most of all by the air planes.

R/C planes and helicopters

Long before the word ‘drone’ was known to the girl next door, I was flying small radio controlled air planes and helicopters. Unfortunately, it’s a hobby which requires – besides a take-off and landing strip, charged batteries and approval of the wife 🙂 – also good weather. But despite many weekly prayers, the latter is not always the case in Belgium.

Flight simulator

The answer to these problems brings me to my next hobby ‘flight simulators’: weatherproof, no landing strip required, runs as long as the power grid is on and keeps me close to home (which is in favour of the so needed approval of my wife).

I started with FS2002, moved over to FSX and I’m enjoying since a few years the pimped up version of FSX, ‘P3D’ (Prepar3d).

DIY Home cockpit

But the ultimate goal is to build my own real-life ‘simpit’, and moreover to build it from scratch! There are already plenty of 737’s, A320’s … out there, but I wanted a smaller air plane which can cover quite large distances, but is nimble enough to land at smaller airports. My choice? The magnificent Beechcraft King Air 350i!

CNC router

As I want to build my own cockpit, I will need to manufacture a lot of parts. Some things can ‘easily’ be done with hand tools, but others are just too difficult. Therefore I’m planning to build a CNC machine which should allow me to build high-precision parts. But before I can build parts, I needed a machine that does the job for me…

Enthusiastic as I always am, I bought plans to build the Momus CNC router. Unfortunately, the plans were made for the US market, which resulted in all measurements and materials being in imperial format (inches, feet…). To get to know the design better and to avoid errors, I started re-drawing the blueprints in metric format (mm, cm, m). Why Momus CNC? It’s compact, not too expensive to build, well-documented, has an enclosure (noise/dust), is built already several times by fellow CNC enthusiasts. Last but not least feasible to be built with hand tools.

And this, is more or less the point where I decided to share the progress of my projects with you.

 

Enjoy reading, feel free to leave comments.

Maarten

(December 5th, 2016).