… well, not really.
[blog entry from december 2016]
But this blog is. From now the Citation Project will be presented here with a lot of detailed informations to encourage and help others with their projects – and of course for all of those, who are simply interested in the stage of the citation homecockpit.
Homecockpits are not that kind of rare – but nearly all of them are a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320. Sometimes a Cessna 172 or a Boeing 747. But that’s not what I was interested in. I always enjoyed an aircraft having both characteristics of a small general aviation aircraft, but also to be able to get on longer routes with sufficient speed. And basically that’s what the Citation makes the perfect aircraft to me!
Well: There is absolutely nothing about a Citation cockpit within the homecockpit community. And: So far I only know about another one, who made a Citation Mustang with the G1000. And this was not what I was looking for. I was always interested in those older Citation Jets with steam gauges and only the PFD and ND being powered by displays. So it was a kind of volunteering work that resulted in this lack of information.
So now we are at he middle of march 2016. That’s were the real work began. Drawing, Drawing, and even more drawing. Spending days (and nights) just making drawings, checking them, finding errors, correcting the errors, and again and again. Looking for materials, looking for the right color (very special topic!), checking how I could do this and that, and so on. With every further step of drawing, the motivation decreased. But the first day of milling changed everything and motivation rapidly increased.
There has been a lot of work into the project so far. I’m talking about like 500 to 600 hours. But still the aircraft is not flyable. Why? Well, there were a lot of things to learn during the project. A year ago I actually never saw a cnc mill myself, today I am able to use them myself. Simply learning how to use this technology took a lot of time (and trying), and of course there was always this willing to increase the quality, so even more time was spent learning and trying and checking and redoing things.
For now, there are going to be some major steps in the next few weeks!