June and July 2005! I spent a lot of hours cleaning all my pedestal parts, and painting the gear lever and my seat rails as well. It was another huge task, which I am lucky to have behind me! See all the photos below, and judge if you want to make that dirty job! ;-)

Simply click on the pictures, to open an 850 x 567 pixel sized view of the corresponding picture!

Well, this is the gear lever as it looks right now! Cleaned, painted and ready to go into the simulator..

But have a look at all the pictures below, to see the long way......

Here we go! The work on the gear lever is finished! The most time consuming work? Well, have a look at the white letters "LOCK OVERRIDE". I painted them with "China White" and sealed over with some transparency spray-paint!

I'm glad, that there are no other small letters needed to be painted!!

Here you see my newly painted 737 style clipboard. Isn't it a beauty?

It took me a lot of time for taking apart, removing the old crack paint, cleaning, spray painting with primer, and the finish with a dark brown colour!!

The brown colour is RAL 8017, the same colour is used for the gear lever!

As next I removed the old paint from my 727 trim wheels. YES I KNOW! The 777 does not really has them ;-)

But as I have an old 727 pedestal - you will see it later on this page - I will use it in my simulator. To bring the trim wheels to a new condition as you can see on the left picture, was also a hard and dirty way...

Here you see my brand new seat rails for my 727 seats. They are individually manufactured especially for me! They are steel, and have an overall length of 1,40 m. They are splitted in two parts each rail. I have two of the set shown in the right picture.

I painted the rails with a rust protection paint, and then in the dark brown used for all parts before. The seat rails gives me the a travel-distance of about 1,20 m for moving my seats!

Thanks to the team of Wienwork, who are producing my seat rails!

Now a really dirty task of my work began!

I took my pedestal apart. Here is the clean mechanism for switching on fuel for all the three engines. Have a look at all the pictures, and see grease and dust of about 37 years.....

This unit keeps the reverser locked in open position. Look at all the dust and grease I had to remove after taking the unit apart!! Oh boy, can you imagine how my hands looked after this procedure? Yes, I had some gloves to protect my hands, but they were not very effective...

Yeah, I took the thrust lever apart too!

They had a lot of grease and dust on and in it too. Now they are clean, and ready to be painted and connected to the potentiometer.

This is my 727 pedestal! I bought it in 1998 ... long time ago ....

In the meantime the pedestal is very clean, so I will get no dirty fingers, when building in all the cables and potentiometer for the computer!

This is how your room can look, when you are taking a 727 pedestal apart.....

Nowadays the room is clean again. This is the room where the simulator will be build!

After collecting a complete set of real 777 Eaton switches for the 777 MCP, I was also able to get a 777 MCP too. I got it from Robert Prather from Sim Spares! Right hand you can see a picture. Backlighting is working very well!.

Thanks Robert, for that beautiful piece of hardware!!