I have had a minor obsession with motion platforms for the past couple years and have tried to build one off and on for awhile. I finally realized that I don’t have the mechanical knowledge to build something that’s going to work well and I wasn’t really having any fun building it. Although, I did get the electronics and stepper motors to work great with X-Plane, but then I gave up and purchased one. I chose the Next Level Racing platform, but refused to spend the full price, so I setup an automated search on Ebay using IFTTT. I found one and got it at much lower cost than original price and got it in like-new condition. This thing is absolutely amazing.
It took me a day to figure out how to mount my chair and cockpit to the thing, with a couple trips to Lowes and mounting/remounting to get the balance correct. My first attempt had the weight shifted too far back and the whole thing flipped over. Bad design on my part, so I added an extra large base on the bottom. I’m overloading the weight limit of this unit quite a bit I’m sure, as I mounted the seat and cockpit panel to to it, which took some minor engineering. The unit still works well, now that I shifted the whole chair forward a bit.
I had to turn down all motion quite a bit to attain a realistic feel of the real plane. It’s not perfect, but much better than I could have dreamed. I’m happy I stopped wasting my time trying to build one myself. Highly recommended, it’s well worth it, plus works with every other flight sim and racing/space sims.