This is the long version of getting my simulator up and running. From choosing which simulator to get to the impact screen to the lighting for it all.

By far the biggest (and first) decision to be made was which simulator to get. After lots and lots of reading on various forums and many YouTube videos, I decided to jump in with both feet and purchase a Foresight Sports GC Quad. It came with a course bundle along with FSX 2018 and the putting add-on. I was quite excited to get this as it would let me geek out on all the numbers that can be displayed to the user. I chose the Quad because it was on sale and I was also assured by the Foresight rep that there would be absolutely no future sale on its ceiling-mounted brother, the (brand new) GC Hawk.

Uh-huh, right.

Like another member here, we also had a house built with the builders digging an extra two feet deeper in an area just for this simulator. The space ended up being 20x20 feet and 11 feet tall.

At this point in the build, I had purchased the GC Quad and the impact screen material. The next hardest part now was choosing a projector. My desire was to have as big a 16:9 image as a projector could provide. So the first thing was to consider image quality at 10 feet from the screen – the distance that I chose to hit from. From my reading, a 4K projector, though costly, would show a better image when I’m 10 feet from it, compared to HD. That is to say, if I’m 25 feet from the screen I might not be able to tell the difference between 4K and HD, but at 10 feet from the screen, I should be able to see the superior image difference. The same theory goes with getting a large screen TV. The larger the screen, the easier it is to see the poorer picture.

I also DID NOT want to see my shadow – at all.

So my target projector needed to be 4K, mounted about 10 - 12 feet from the screen, give me a 16:9 image that’s about 120 inches tall, and didn’t break the bank (the break the bank part was hard!). The tedious part was using the throw calculator at Projector Central and putting in all the different projectors to see what I could find. It took a while and unfortunately the two that I chose were a little pricey but they did what I wanted. I ended up with an Optima 4K550ST.

Then came computer time. I enjoyed building our last two computers for the home so I naturally figured that I’d build this one too. The plan was for a decent processor and SSD for some speed, along with decent RAM and then splurge on a video card. I figured that a multi-core processor was not really needed as this would only be used for the golf sim so this is what I ended up with:

• Intel i7 8700K 3.7GHz

• Noctua NH-D15S cooler

• Gigabyte Z390 AORUS Ultra mother board

• Corsair Dominator Platinum 32gb RAM

• Samsung 970 EVO m.2 500gb SSD

• NVIDIA GeForce RTX2080s

• Corsair 850w power supply

I erred on the “overbuild it” side as I doubted that any future upgrades coming from Foresight on the software side would require a downgrade from me on the hardware side.

My nephew had an old computer tower that he didn’t need so I got that for free and it had a 1tb SSD in it that he also didn’t want (SCORE) so that was nice. A Logitech MK750 wireless keyboard rounded out the build.

The monitor for this is a 24 inch Dell touchscreen. I really like the touch screen as it makes maneuvering around FSX so much easier. I also got a Samsung flat screen TV from Best Buy that would simply mimic whatever is on the computer monitor and let me be able to read it from far away. And that caused a lot of trouble. I wanted the impact screen to show the golf course and nothing else. If I wanted any info, I’d look at my flat screen TV. I thought that this would be easy to do except I couldn’t get FSX to let me do it. Whenever I inserted the third monitor (the TV) into the system, FSX would see it and reassign the ‘main’ and ‘secondary’ labels to the different monitors. The final and only solution that I came up with was getting a DisplayPort splitter and, once FSX is up and running, then plugging in the TV and turning it on. It isn’t elegant but it works for me. If anyone has a method that works better, please let me know.

For the cabinet to hold it all, I went to Ikea when my daughter and her hubby were looking for some house stuff. I actually found something that would work if I just left out the mirror and one shelf and moved another shelf up about a foot. I got this cabinet home and, while assembling it, it fell apart when I put it on its side. Grrr. The fix for that was taking it back apart and, wherever two pieces touched each other, I installed either screws and nuts or rivets to hold things together. Rivets? Yep. I have several pounds of different sizes just sitting and waiting to be pounded. I also drilled a bunch of cooling holes as an air inlet on one side of the cabinet and put a 200mm fan that draws air out of the cabinet on the other side. The thought being that all my airflow goes from right to left, in the computer tower and the computer cabinet.

Right around this time in the project, Foresight had another sale. Remember the previously mentioned, never-going-to-be-on-sale GC Hawk? It was on sale, of course….for about $4k off. That made quite a difference to me and my budget because, if I spent about $1k more, I’d have the Hawk, which I really wanted in the first place. Why? Because, even though this sim will be used by golfers, it will also be the (hopeful) focal point of family get-togethers, dinners and such. These times will have non-golfers having a good time and I didn’t like the idea of having a target (the Quad) about a foot away from a giggling non-golfer swinging a stick with a hunk of metal on the end of it. So after a few heated emails with my Foresight rep, I was allowed to return my (unopened) Quad for a Hawk. The Hawk also came with a course bundle and FSX2018.

When first planning this whole project out, I did not want to build up the basement in pieces. So the decision was made to finish the entire (2400 sq ft) basement at the same time, while also trying to figure the wants and needs for the simulator as the construction progressed. Also while in the planning stage for this big job, was consideration for what I would hire out and what I would do myself. Except for the drywall work, I was open to do anything else.

After I came to my senses, it was pointed out to me that my age might limit the amount of work done each day. (As in, do you really want this finished in two years?) So, right off the bat, we bailed on doing the framing. We found some guys who knocked that out in about three nights. And was THAT ever the right decision!

After the framing, I was left with a 20x20 foot area of bare concrete floor. As most of you probably know, concrete slab floors are anything but flat. Because I wanted to have a practice putting area surrounding the hitting mat, we decided to put in a sub-floor over this concrete. We started with 2x4s that we laid the 3.5” side down and used a powder actuated nail gun to secure them. Using a laser level, we came up with a routine of shimming to within a sixteenth of an inch with shims before actually gluing and nailing the 2x4s down. 16 inches on center and nailed/shimmed probably every 12ish inches, that was a lot of banging. ¾” OSB over the top of this and the end product was surprisingly flat.

(GREAT NEWS! Right around this time in the project, my company offered an incentive package for early retirement to the old coots. I never thought of myself as an old coot but if it fits…. Anyway, after lots of reading, studying and asking questions and then talking to our retirement guy and accountant, we took the plunge. I am now officially retired! WOW, is this great!)

Next came electrical and HVAC. My bro-in-law is a former general contractor and he helped out tremendously on this entire project. One of his inputs was to have the HVAC subbed out too as it takes some talent and tooling which neither of us had. For the electrical work, we did that with an hour or so of tutorship from an electrician friend of his to get the ball rolling. Most of the electrician’s help was in the form of wire routing and placement of switches and outlets. Once that was done, we were off to the races.

For the electrical part of the sim, lighting was my next concern. With the Hawk, cameras are looking at your ball and club so I figured that lighting would need to be just right for the Hawk to work well. After a lot of reading and emails to Foresight, I still had no firm plan on what and how much lighting to install. So, figuring that I’d much rather have too much light than too little, we ended up putting in three rows of LED ceiling lights with each row individually controlled with its own dimmer switch. The hope was for even lighting with a minimum of shadows. After this was roughed in, we thought that a couple of flood lights would also be nice, so in went four more lights! The floods are installed so when a RH golfer is addressing the ball, if he/she looks up, there are two floodlights about 2-3 feet to the left and right of their shoulders and about 3 feet in front of them. And then two more for a lefty. Dimmers, naturally. Lighting? Yes, please and lots of it.

So with electrical and HVAC done, we had a bathroom to plan and plumb. That slowed things down a couple days but we tripped thru that and it was now drywall, mud, and tape time.

Being over 60 years old and with a back that’s fragile, I never wanted anything to do with the drywall work. Lucky for us, the framers had a friend who did drywall. All these guys were super easy to work with and they all worked harder in one night than I would for a week where I (used to) work. These guys could each take the two sheets of 10 foot long drywall off their truck and walk right over and put it through the basement window like it was nothing.

After the MESSY job of hanging drywall and sanding – dust was in just about every part of the house – it was now paint time. I’ll do paint, but I hate it. For me it’s tedious and messy messy. But, once again, my BIL had the tooling, this time in the form of a pro paint sprayer. So we prepped the entire basement, got on our bunny suits and masks and primed then colored the whole place. YUK. What a drag. But we again saved a few thousand dollars by also doing this ourselves. And we also did a bit of a shortcut by painting EVERYTHING the same color and paint type. So the entire basement was now Whisper White semi-gloss.

We then picked out carpet, laminate flooring, and for the sim, a putting green material for the entire 20x20 sim area. I got putting green samples from a couple places but the sent samples were worthless as I couldn’t do much with a 4x4 inch piece of material. Luckily, the carpet dude had done a couple putting greens for people and he got me a 2x12 foot sample of what they last used. So I had a nice piece to practice on and it seemed to work just fine for me. It’s not Augusta, but it rolled true enough for my skill level and in it went. Edit: I found out the putting green material is Park Central Oasis Indoor/Outdoor Premium Artificial Grass Turf. A link to a place (not the place that I got it from) is in the parts page.

So what was the cost for the basement? When building the house, the builders quoted us about $50k+ for them to finish the basement. Of course, it would be a minimum build with no consideration for a golf simulator. And for example, because additional floor level night lights for the upstairs were going to cost us $200 EACH (no thank you, I installed the 8 additional lights @ $8 per light + 89 cents per box + $20 for 14/2 Romex), who knew HOW much it would cost for just the electrical part for the basement. When we were planning out the work, we had one framer who, as it turns out, made some very accurate quotes for costs, tell us that we’d be spending about $75k to finish our basement like we wanted to if we hired everything out.

Ouch.

As of today, as I’m writing this and with the basement complete, we spent about $28k. I’m thrilled at the savings but I’m also more thrilled to be done so I can now concentrate on the simulator.

I tackled this whole project like a large puzzle with many small puzzles for the different parts. I would read about members’ sims or look at photographs, decide if a particular feature is something that I wanted, and then figured out how I would adapt their (whatever) to fit my situation. One of these puzzles was how to mount the screen. It seemed to me that the easiest and by far the most future proof is to mount 1-1.5” angled and slotted steel and then use bungee cords and tarp clamps to attach from the screen to the steel. While also trying to consider for the previously mentioned non-golfers using this thing, I wanted to come up with some kind of method for protecting the walls that surrounded the impact screen too. This was easily solved by installing more OSB on the walls that extended out from the screen area for about 6 feet. This did two things: it protected my walls for cheap and it also gave me the luxury of having attach points for anything, anywhere on the walls. If I didn’t like where something was mounted, I could move it an inch over and not worry about hitting studs under the drywall. This OSB paneling went on the left and right sides plus the ceiling too.

Very nice.

But now I had ugly OSB hanging where I once had pristine white walls. Curtains were the answer and even better was using 11 foot long table cloths that cost $12 each. All I had to do was sew them together – no problem, I used to make sails for sailboats as a teenager – and figure out a mounting method. EMT won for the mounting and I would use a conduit bender to get it to finish right at the edge of the projected image. Some holes thru the EMT every couple feet and screwed into the OSB and presto, my walls are covered AND it gives it a finished look. And because I used 2-3 times the black material that I actually needed, when I crammed on my curtains, it bunched up and gave me automatic pleats.

And the angled steel? Wow, that stuff was pricey. If I used Amazon and bought 80 feet, with Prime and free shipping it still would have been almost $500. Once again, my BIL saved me as he knew someone who had a fabrication business. They ordered it for us and it cost me a total of $120.

After even more reading on the forum, I decided that some kind of backup to the impact screen would be a good idea, mostly to extend the life of the screen but also (hopefully) help the ball drop straight down instead of having to play dodge ball after each shot. There were several members who bought memory foam/gel foam mattress toppers and hung those behind the screen as a “target” for the ball to hit. I found a decently priced one on Amazon. It arrived and I decided that if I sandwiched the topper between two 1x3s, that it would have the best chance of hanging straight, once suspended from my ceiling mounted angle iron.

Bzzzzzz!! Wrong.

It could not have gone worse. The top three feet were fine, but after that it started pooching out like Santa's belly. Pulling on the bottom or sides had no effect.

Back to the drawing board.

Plan B for this screen backup was some kind of netting suspended right behind the impact screen. This would also take the impact of the ball and keep the screen happy. The additional plus for this method is that if I got a black net, the problem of image bleed-through would also be addressed as many members talked of getting something black to hang behind the white screen and that this improved the image. The reason for not going with the net the first time was simply cost and I thought that I’d try a cheaper solution. I should have just stuck with my favorite phrase – buy once, cry once. Oh well, live and learn. After yet more reading, I went all in with an impact net from West Coast Netting.

And the screen? I got it from dbgolf on the forum. For writing this diary, I had to look up his name and I discovered that he kind of dropped out of sight and the thread to get screen material was closed. I hope that all is well with him. I guess I’m glad that I ordered two screens so it’s nice to have one sitting on the shelf. I mounted my slotted angle iron – on that OSB - about 8 inches from the back wall and used the bungee cords and tarp clamps to hang both the screen and my black back-up net. It worked very nicely and I only had to cover the top bungees with a 4-5 inch piece of my leftover table cloth material. And because I was aiming for a 10 foot tall image and the material from dbgolf measured 10 feet, I ended up sewing on panels that effectively extended the height of the screen by a foot or so. With most of the extra material on the bottom, I had a built-in skirt that helped corral the hit balls to drop and start rolling back to the hitter.

For the ceiling just in front of the screen, I used plywood that I glued on pieces of 3 inch memory foam mattress toppers. Three toppers covered the whole ceiling area. I covered the foam with, what else? more of my black tablecloth material. These panel assemblies are held up with Beau Clips and this idea worked very nicely. Unfortunately, the gel foam doesn’t hold its shape well when fabric is pulled taut over it. Because of this, I’ll say that the foam panels turned out the ugliest of all the different parts of this build. Next time I’ll use a different type of foam – something that I can pull against and it won’t compress and deform so easily. At least everything is black and it’s hard to see!

For the actual Hawk install, I had already wired the ceiling for 110v and a CAT6 cable that I made myself as the Foresight supplied one was too short for my use. Once again my bro-in-law had the tooling for this and I also was able to use his fancy tester to test the cable before installing. The Hawk likes to be hung from a 10’ 6” (or closer) ceiling and mine was 10’9”. Grrr. I wanted everything to spec so there wouldn’t be any second guessing if something didn’t work right so I built up a small piece out of plywood that I fastened to the ceiling that gave the Hawk a solid base and also hung it at a nice, 10 foot 5 inch height.

Next came the projector install. Before almost any work was started I placed some wood sticks to simulate where the screen would hang and placed the projector on a ladder to get an good idea where it would end up. My desire was to finish with an image that was 10 feet tall and 18 feet wide. So I kept moving the Optima around until the test pattern was that size. I then assembled my projector mount – a piece of 1.5 inch galvanized pipe and a floor flange – and temporarily installed the Optima on the ceiling. I had to move it an inch or so to find the perfect spot after also mounting an assembled piece that represented the Hawk and how much it would hang down from the ceiling. I then took the Optima down and, using a laser level and a Sharpie, I traced the laser level on the floor exactly below the center of my 1-1/2 inch pipe mount. Now, as long as my pattern doesn’t disappear from the floor, I can install the Optima in pretty much the exact same spot. (I laid down a bunch of packing tape on the floor to protect my pattern.)

One of the more difficult decisions to make was which hitting mat to get? There had to be as many opinions on mats as there were mats. Not wanting to make my own, I narrowed it down to two and Fiberbuilt won. From reading, the biggest downside to the Fiberbuilt seemed to be that because of the cushioning, a fat shot is still rewarded with decent yardage. The biggest upside is that the same cushioning that rewards the fat shot also gives cushioning that saves joints. Saving joints and reducing risk of injury easily won for me. I recall several instances of forum members that didn’t buy the Fiberbuilt, received some kind of injury as a result and ended up buying the Fiberbuilt in the end.

Right now the simulator is working as advertised. The club data is working after a bumpy start as I didn’t know how to turn it on. Once that was figured out it’s a happy sim. I currently have the hitting mat laying on top of my putting green. This mat is thick, at 1-1/2 inches tall and I originally wanted my hitting mat to be flush with the putting green by cutting out a portion of the floor so the hitting mat lays in there flush and even with the surrounding putting area. I’m still considering doing this but maybe at a later date. Also, for my putting area, I'm going to put some 4 inch sewer pipe in a few spots as holes to putt the ball in. I think a standard hole size is 4-1/4 inches, so the smaller target will make the real holes seem larger (and sewer pipe is cheaper - especially when a house is being built next door and they have a dumpster!) The only other finishing touch that’s needed is hanging some blackout curtains in the three windows that are in the two rooms. This time of year there is actually direct sunlight that hits the screen in the late afternoon. The curtains are sitting in a corner just waiting for me to hang them.

Also, I’m actually disappointed with the sharpness of my projected image.

My projector is 4k.

My graphics card is 4k.

My uni-directional HDMI cable is 4k.

FSX2018 and now 2020 is 4k.

Everything is 4k but my picture is not impressive at all. Supposedly, the projector is able to make the image the size that it is, so I don’t think I’m over stressing the projector. Maybe I’m asking too much and I’m spoiled by large TVs. I don’t know. I tried looking into any projector adjustments – I found none except focusing – and the settings in FSX are on for best performance…does that mean best image too? I guess it’s good enough for now.

The bottom line and the one and only thing that really matters is that this thing is an absolute hoot. It turned out about 98% like I hoped for and I believe this will get lots of use in the coming years.