Author: spit40

The Recommended Selling Price (RSP) scheme represents a huge step forward for the great many people who do not have 3D printers and may wish to get their hands on some AuthentiKit.

We have established a worldwide network of AuthentiKit community members who have 3D printing capability and have agreed to print AuthentiKit parts for others to an agreed fixed price and quality standard. That quality standard includes a warranty.

See our Recommended Selling Price page for more.

Everything you need in one box (almost!)

If you love tinkering and building projects then this probably doesn’t interest you but for most people the ideal would be a single box with everything in it so you can just sit down and assemble your throttle quadrant, trim wheels, flight stick etc. Well we’ve got pretty close. The process of getting hold of some AuthentiKit is now as simple as this.

• Choose the kit you want
• Follow the link through to SimKitSupplies.com where you can order the hardware kit, including the tools you will need, for direct delivery anywhere in the world. This is Box #1
• The price for the 3D parts kit is shown on the same page along with with a request form. Fill that out and you’ll be contacted by a quality checked printer in your local area who will confirm their P&P terms and answer any questions before you place your order with them. They will ship the 3D parts to you. This is Box #2

The hardware kit also contains the tools you will need so once you have both boxes, all you need is a kitchen table and a spare Sunday afternoon. If you’d be happy to assemble an Airfix kit you should enjoy these projects too!

I’m delighted to finally be able to announce the AuthentiKit collaboration with Aeroplane Heaven. Working with Baz Bromley on the finer details of the Spitfire Mk1A throttle quadrant has been great fun. These guys have so much knowledge and passion for their aircraft and the final solution we came up with for the Boost Cutout implementation was extremely rewarding. The throttle quadrant, elevator and rudder trim wheels are available for download as of today.

For such a simple device, trim wheels can be the source of a surprising amount of frustration in flight simulation. The ideal of course is that you rotate your trim wheel a certain number of degrees and the wheel in the simulator mirrors that amount exactly producing the desired amount of trim. In practice it is almost never like that as the simulator has to cope with being mapped to a variety of devices all of which generate pulses or clicks at varying rates

• a key press and whatever auto repeat speed kicks in
• a hardware trim wheel which has a variable number of clicks per revolution
• a mouse scroll wheel which also has a variable number of clicks per turn

Since Microsoft Flight Simulator’s launch there have been a number of iterations in how they handle trim wheel rotation speed and it is easy to finds support threads on the MSFS forum expressing frustration about this issue.

In one test with the Spitfire MkIX we found that you needed up to twenty rotations of the trim wheel to achieve a full nose up trim!

An issue for all hardware manufacturers

This is a problem for all manufacturers of trim hardware, such as Flight Velocity, who had to rewrite their software to achieve a reliable solutions for customers.

We’re hitting this problem too particularly with the elevator trim wheel (the rudder trim wheel seems to work well for some reason) so we have a project underway at present that should provide a solution not only for AuthentiKit but for anyone making trim wheels for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Our aim is to provide a number of algorithms to give people flexibility to match the physical hardware to the sim as precisely as possible – after all we’re passionate about things being authentic and feeling right !

• Apply a multiplier so that each real click of the hardware encoder sends a multiple of clicks to the sim which could be fine tuned to the aircraft
• A two speed option – slow and fine or fast. The software detects when the wheel is being moved quicker and automatically applies a speed up multiplier
• Simulating an axis – the wheel can be calibrated so that you choose how many rotations/pulses of the wheel equate to a full range between 0 and 100%

Free and open to the community

Our intention is not to limit this software to AuthentiKit products, after all AuthentiKit is very much a freeware open solution and actually uses very simplistic technologies. We will make this software available for free download to anyone who may find it useful whether they use a commercial hardware trim wheel or a self-built home cockpit.

Today Big Radials released their P-40B Tomahawk for Microsoft Flight Simulator. This is a very exciting day for AuthentiKit because their download also comes with replica flight controls created directly from their CAD files for a really authentic peripherals option when you are flying their feisty looking warbird.

The first control available is an elevator and rudder trim wheel set, soon to be followed by a throttle quadrant and coming later on will be a replica flight stick. These controls use the same Universal Hub as we created for the Spitfire MkIX controls which is a great cost saving as the hub contains the expensive part of the system.

OzWookiee got in touch recently. He’s behind The Goose that has been giving everyone a lot of fun in MSFS. He recently launched Big Radials and announced they’re coming out with a P40B for Microsoft very soon. It didn’t take us long to decide that we’d work together and create some AuthentiKit flight controls for this feisty looking warbird! Big Radials are sharing designs from the aircraft development which makes the design of the flight controls much easier. I’ll post some work in progress designs very shortly.

I’ve had rather a shock this week. It has transpired that some of the reference materials I used to model the shape of the spade grip handle, lever and upper angle bracket of the Spitfire MkIX flight stick were the intellectual property of Heritage Flight Simulation. These guys have invested a huge amount of time meticulously detailing every inch of a Spitfire MkIX and their highly detailed plans and other products are available from their website.

I had a very amicable phone call with Roel Stausebach, the managing director of heritage flight simulation, and explained that the reference images were obtained in good faith from a 3rd party who was known to Roel. He was very understanding but we were both in agreement that the designs in my download that used his references should be taken down ASAP. From my own experience running a design company prior to AuthentiKit I am well aware of the importance of intellectual property, even in this digital age of sharing, so I’m somewhat embarassed to have made this naive error.

I would like to thank Roel for his goodwill and allowing time for me to make changes, so as not to leave supporters of AuthentiKit in the lurch. I’ve had a very busy week going back to my Fusion 360 sketches and redrawing from my own Spitfire photographs and other references I had purchased. A bit of creative licence was needed too where the references weren’t very clear. I think you’ll still like the result – the photo is of my new fire button.

As of now the download available on this site contains reworked references which do not draw from Heritage Flight Simulation’s work. As you’ll see on my download page I haven’t quite finished a couple of objects but they’ll be added in the next couple of days .

We’ve also agreed that I owe Roel a beer which I hope to make good on when I can get out to Wexford in Ireland and check out their very impressive MkIX simulator. Having built a G-Seat myself I’m particularly interested in that feature of their simulator.

Updated 07 Feb 2021 – The remaining objects have been reworked and the current version 2.5 now contains all downloads.