Hi

I have been building a cyclic stick from an X-45 joystick and it is now at a stage where it works well functionally, though I may well spend a bit of time in the future tarting up the aesthetics a bit.

Anyway, just thought I'd share the result:




If anyone is interested in the process, I'll do a run-down. This took me several weeks of on/off work on it but most of that was working out whether I could do it at all, and then working out the things I didn't like about it and fixing them. I reckon that the actual doing-the-work component would equate to less than a day or two for anyone with a passing familiarity with soldering.

Cheers!

T

That's pretty nifty. Good Work.

Nice work!

Nice, how does the range of motion feel now that its extended?

Cheers guys!

The range of motion feels very good.

I was worried that by lengthening the stick it would make it all too sensitive for the game to handle and, in fairness, some games can't handle having the sensitivity up that high (CoD, Take-on Helicopters) but for the DCS games it's fine.

Getting the curves right took a bit of trial and error but I've got that all figured out now. I ended up using

Deadzone: 0
Saturation X: 100
Saturation Y: 100
Curvature: -51

for both X and Y axes and this works very well. I was playing BS last night and it just felt very, very smooth and natural.

The key to making it feel right seems to be to remove the built in spring mechanism from the equation - I did that by binding the spring up tightly with cable ties but if I'd had more confidence in the set-up earlier on I would have removed it and the plate altogether when I had the stick apart. If you have the main spring together with the new springs they seem to fight one another and it all feels very jerky.

That's a great idea....have you any close-ups of your centering mechanism?

Centring mechanism? What centring mechanism?

There isn't much to see in fairness. I have put cable ties tightly around the centre spring coils for the original centring mechanism to just keep it out of the way (if I could be bothered I would remove the spring and plate altogether). After that the big springs that you see coming from the sides provide as much of a centring mechanism as there is. It's a very fluid feeling.

If you let go of the stick it does centre but in a fairly laid back fashion - there is no twang to a strongly defined centre point. The only time this causes a minor problem is in Black Shark where you have to centre the stick after trimming but, in fairness, it's easy to overcome and will generally naturally return to close enough to centre to give you back control.

The key to getting the stick to centre effectively was to use pull-springs that are almost entirely relaxed when the stick is centred then make it so that they can slide freely through the eyelets on the right-angle plates at the edge of the body of the stick when the stick moves towards them. The sequence of parts from the shaft is: cable-tie holding the ends of the springs > spring > drinking straw > eyelet > wing nut > retaining ring.

The drinking straw is probably not necessary but it prevents the spring going clonk, clonk, clonk as you move the stick and helps the spring get out of the way when the stick is at extremes of its movement.

The hardest thing about this will probably be to find the right spring. The ones I used came in a pack of assorted springs I got from Halfords. They are 2.25" long and really powerful - far more powerful than I thought would be of any use. I just went through the box trying each likely candidate until I found one that works.

Anyway, here is a close up:

Additionally, since I set up the springs like this and got rid of the native centring system I have tried playing Take-on: Helicopters and Cliffs of Dover again and it works fine. It takes a little getting used to, especially with TOH's weird flight model, but once you get a feel for it it's fine.

I think that before I tied it up out of the way the native centring spring was fighting the external springs and it was wobbling around the join between the new stick and the old stick.