Buying advice please - Next Level v3 Motion Platform

[MarkR]

I'm looking for some advice and thoughts of other owners or people with good knowledge of the product, please.

I always said I'd buy myself a motion simulator if I could afford one and had the room available. Well, that day may have arrived. I'm impressed by what I've seen of the Next Level v3 Motion Platform

This seems to meet all my criteria:

+ Limited space requirements, I don't have room for a huge sim rig but this seems compact enough to work.
+ Works with Oculus Rift VR, that fixed head position setting solution is impressive
+ Great support and regular updates from the developers
+ Available in the UK
+ Works with my current Thrustmaster wheel and accessories.
+ Sub £3k for the full setup, I'm not a pro racer I'm not looking for a practice simulator this is just for fun so the cost/fun balance has to be right.

So help me do the man maths! Is it worth it?

Is there another similar product I should also look at? It would need to be reasonably compact, work with VR, available in the UK without too much hassle and in the same £3-5K price range.

Is there anywhere I can try one or even better several of the systems in the UK?

 

[RCHeliguy]

I added 5/8" height for good measure when I redrilled the NLRv3 support holes and counter bored the top and bottoms where there was interference.

I should actually be able to try it out this time, but dinner's ready and I still need to clean up the garage. I ordered a bunch of 1/4" x6" wide aluminum bar for transducer and other uses.

A bit more room and no bolt heads in the way.

 

[Spineblower]

Today I found on Amazon.co.uk a deal for next level Motion Platform V3.

I am a little bit skeptical... I bought it but i do not pay yet.

What do you think? Amazon covers if something goes wrong (I can pay with amazon shopping basket)?

 

[EsxPaul]

Today I found on Amazon.co.uk a deal for next level Motion Platform V3.

I am a little bit skeptical... I bought it but i do not pay yet.

What do you think? Amazon covers if something goes wrong (I can pay with amazon shopping basket)?

I nearly did the same thing on Sunday just gone. The price was exactly the same at £405. This was from a company called "Outdoor Aventures". They also trade under the name "Oztwo".

I emailed them directly to ask about the condition of the unit as at that price I would expect it to be 2nd hand with a lot of use. What I received back was a very generic mail, telling me that it was a special offer on a brand new unit and would only last for 3 days.
They also asked me to fill in a form, giving the EAN number, quantity required and price. I thought they would know the price!

Seemed to me that they were just a drop shipping company and left me feeling uneasy about the whole thing. Too good to be true came to mind so I didn't bother to reply and just left it there.

I then took a look at their storefront which had hundreds of items listed, all at the price of £405, no matter what the item was. Later in the day I revisited the same storefront and all that was now listed were camera lenses and nothing else. The NLR V3 had disappeared.

Please keep us updated with how this goes because I think we'll all be jumping in if it turns out to be the real thing.

 

[Spineblower]

 

[anton_Chez]

Sounds a little fishy to me, but it's through Amazon so not sure how dodgy someone could be through there with the protection such a site should provide...

 

[wajdi]

Yea, very strange.

 

[sebna]

99% scam. Amazon remove them from the site but they cannot keep up.

What usually happens next they will want you to use BT or some other shady method of payment off Amazon website.

Be careful as they send you emails that look like from amazon but link will redirect to some other payment method.

Once payment like this is made Amazon will not help you.

If it is too good to be true, well it usually is too good to be true

Cheers

 

[Spineblower]

Yeah. I know. It is too good to be true.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I feel like I've ordered that much in different sized bolts! LOL!

 

[sebna]

I feel like I've ordered that much in different sized bolts! LOL!

Bolts in top economy countries are crazy expensive.

I live in Ireland but I have easy access to Polish market in EU and I am buying bolts 8-10x cheaper then in euro zone countries . They are like dirt cheap. What they should be like (there were times when you would buy all nuts and bolts by weight. So you would buy 1kg of DIN 912 M8x25.. nobody would sell them itemized as it was too cheap to even bother - it has changed now but they are still very cheap in compare to euro zone).

All bolts, nuts and washers for SFX costed me like €2-3 (it was part of bigger purchase)...

Other good example are trolley wheels (for my 80/20 P1). I paid for set of 4 exactly same trolley wheels less then what I would have to pay for 1 wheel like that in euro zone or US... all those small items have huge markups and they all come from china or same factory somewhere else in the world...

 

[RCHeliguy]

Wow!!! I'm seeing about $10 USD for say 20 bolts. I'm pretty much only ordering SS. FYI, I realize that 12.9 steel is stronger.

 

[RCHeliguy]

OK, transducer junkies, how do you think this will work?

I'm going to add one piece of 1/4" aluminum as a spacer above the isolators. The isolators outer edge to outer edge are 6". My plan is to put a piece of 6" wide aluminum across the entire width of the foot assembly here with a transducer on each end. With the 1/4" spacers and the lift from the offset of the brackets there should be about 3/8" clearance for transducer vibration before the metal would bottom out.

My current Fanatec CS3.0 pedals will be bolted on all 4 corners. In the back they will bolt straight to the brackets relying on the rubber underneath to allow for some motion and the front of the pedals will mount to the front outer isolators.

Isolators on all four corners felt too flexy for me. My hope is that with 5 isolators on the front there will be less flex and still a clear left vs. right.

However if I get the HE Sprints like I'm planning and can just mount them behind the plate so that they have no flex, but I can still feel the vibrations where my feet are on the foot rest.

Thoughts?

I've verified that I got rid of a lot of the flex already

 

[BrainsBush]

A part of a buying process is also to consider the (after sales) support.Well if you're in doubt about this with regards to NextLevelRacing I can confirm that they did an excellent job!

For some reason the left front spring of my NLRv3 broke suddenly. Probably because of metal fatigue/moving mechanical part (?) which can happen. I contacted NLR support and Matthew took care of sending two springs under warranty. During the logistics Matthew also sent me pro actively status updates via mail. No not a computer generated mail but a personal 'hand written' mail.

Good on Ya mate and have a cold one

 

[anton_Chez]

Same, I had a spring snap too. Bastard of a thing to put on yourself, but still was an easy fix and swiftly taken care of.

Since building the SFX-100 actuators and having it combined with my V3, I've almost lost complete interest in tactile. Too confusing and time consuming. I only ever use my BK Mini's x 2 now for engine RPM. That's it. I do like to use wheel slide as well but in rF2 it must be bugged as it gives off such a hostile amount of noise that I have disabled that effect entirely for that sim.

 

[Black_rat]

Since building the SFX-100 actuators and having it combined with my V3, I've almost lost complete interest in tactile. Too confusing and time consuming. I only ever use my BK Mini's x 2 now for engine RPM.

Thats interesting to hear.

 

[anton_Chez]

The actuators are also capable of producing engine vibe tactile. But I don't run it because a) I'd rather them focus on what they do best, motion, and b) I feel like I need a reason to keep the tactile mounted, so I use the BK Mini's for engine RPM. I did used to use the longitudinal G force effect from Shake It for braking but I've removed that too.

 

[RCHeliguy]

OMG! That was a BLAST! I was just playing Dirt Rally in VR. I had to dial it back some, but what a difference!!

One thing that always bothered me was that the tactile sound track in SimVibe never had a bump when you landed after going airborne. Not a problem now! Loving this!

I can't wait to get my transducers connected again for a bit more resolution to the road surface and some engine vibes etc.. Just got a shipping notice for my 7 feet of 6" wide 1/4" 6061 aluminum so it won't be long.

The P1 cockpit is great too! My stick and hand brake were solid and my wheel was solid. Time to turn up the FFB from the pretty tame settings my old chassis could handle and drive some more!

It all felt very solid while I was playing and with the Rift headphones on I couldn't hear the NLRv3 at all !!!!

I think I may stick with my pedals and hand brake for a little while longer. Now I'm wondering what DD would feel like, but first let me bump up my current FFB intensity!

 

[RCHeliguy]

OK, this isn't pretty, but you can see that the P1 Chassis isn't flexing one bit.

I just noticed at about 1:20 that I didn't have the back of the pedal support secured. Whoops!

What's funny is that I was holding a steady pressure on the brake as it went down and I'm not even sure I noticed what was happening. I think that sort of shows how your body can maintain pressure on the brake while your knees are bending dynamically.

 

[anton_Chez]

I made a Simvibe profile for Dirt Rally bumps AGES ago. It was so dead when landing from jumps. You really needed to fine tune it to get them out. I might still have it somewhere but I don't use SImvibe anymore.

 

[RCHeliguy]

I found out that my CSW 2.5 was already set to 100% FFB in the wheel.
I think that is bad news in terms of how long I continue with this wheel base