Thank you to everyone who leaves me comments. It's very much appreciated. Keep them coming! A big part of why I got into flight simulation and the hobby of pit building is because of the fantatsic community spirit, worldwide!
Constuction of the simulator cockpit structure began last Tuesday. Me and my good old Dad (a retired TV engineer who builds house extensions as a hobby! No joke!) bought a load of wood from a D.I.Y store and started building it from the ground up, from our very shoddy drawings! However it looks great so far and we are starting to see the whole picture now. I will post pictures here as soon as possible.
I've also started designing an avionics stack based around Garmin's GNS530. Thanks too Tuomas and Mike (fellow Cessna 172 builders) for this one. I had an idea about building something similar to Simkit's radio stack ages ago (the one they sell is a work of art but too expensive for me) but then dropped it after running into too many difficulties. I came accross RealityXP's 530/430XP software and thought of just stripping an LCD out of its casing attaching it to the avionics bay and using a mouse and keyboard for the input. However, Tuomas and Mike showed me pictures of what they had built and my imagination just run riot. They have both done sterling work and I would like to follow suit. I have some dimensions of the real stack from Garmin and have found the perfect 5" LCD monitor from Sharp to use. Hopefully it will all come together. I'll start som preliminary drawings using Adobe Illustrator and see how it goes.