F16 Landing Gear Panel

The F16 Landing Gear Panel is one of the more complicated panels with an odd shape. It’s located on the left aux panel. It tilts up at an odd angle to accommodate pilot vision, and tilts inward about 10 degree, while the cockpit wall narrows. All these result in its very odd shape.

I do not have the landing gear lever itself, nor do I have the store jettison button and glass cover. Therefore, these are omitted in the 3D model. Also, I have drawn the front facing stems of various toggle switches, but not their back end toggle switch itself.

I have also, against my usual practice of drawing the front markings, and then decal it to the 3D model for rendering. It just look nicer with all those yellow caution markings. ;-)

The Horn Silencer button has been corrected. Also, some missing text is added in.

Also, I have switched to the URW Gordon Regular font. According to MIL-M-18012 B

20 JULY 1964

SUPERSEDING

MIL-C-18012A(ASG)

29 MARCH 1957,

the following fonts are acceptable.

(a) Fonts for engraving:

(1) Gorton extended

(2) Groton normal
(3) Gorton condensed

(b) Fonts for printing and other repro- duction methods:

            (1) Airport semibold
            (2) Futura demibold
            (3) Vogue medium
            (4) Lining Gothic No. 66

(5) Alternate Gothic No. 3

However, the company of the Gorton font was purchased by URW. URW published Gordon Regular, Medium, and Condensed. These are very close, except the little tail of the Q character. After a bit of experiments, I found that Gordon Normal is very close to the one used on the Landing Gear Panel, not the condensed. The venerable MS33558 mil. font, unfortunately, does not have any non alphanumeric characters, nor is it actually does the Q tail twirl. And MS33558 has other problems as well. 1. It is too wide, and 2. the line spacing is too close making it necessary to a. shrink the text (very inconsistent doing this by hand dragging), and b. multiple line text requires multiple separate text entries (trouble with hand aligning them).

On this panel, there are two different size fonts used. One is Gordon Regular 14 pts, and the smaller one is Gordon Regular 12 pts. This matches the EM size of the measured actual. The MS33558 on the other hand, seems to have the wrong EM size, it required upping the size to 16 pts in order to match the EM height of the measured actual.

The URW Gordon font, all three can be purchased in a bundle for about USD $50, USD $20 per font. With Web bundle purchased with desktop, it’s about USD $90, saving about $30 as opposed if you purchase them all separately.

Although the back of the panel is modeled, including the apparent CNC milled button recess and the lighting chamfers, I am a bit sloppy on the toggle switch boxes. Most likely, you & I will get whatever toggle switches we can get ours hands on, so why bother drawing them accurately. I also did not draw the rubber seal around the toggle switch shaft -- I didn’t tear down the toggle switch, so I have no idea what the inside mechanism looks like anyway, so I bullshit on that one.

There are many files, so this time, I upload just one giant zip file.