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Guest kdarling

That darned yoke! Anyone got around the depth problem?

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Guest kdarling

I'm building a Cessna 172 sim in an alcove of my office, using an old cheap computer desk as the base. Above it is a screen for a projector I just got from ebay for outside scenery, and on the desk itself I plan to have a 17" monitor for the gauges, and a smaller one next to it for the avionics panel. Both monitors will be covered with grey and black colored compressed thin foam board available from office supply stores like Staples.. with instrument holes cut out of course. (That foam board is perfect for stuff like this.) The throttle and misc switches will poke through a black foam panel below the desktop.However... I would really love the yoke (old CH Pro painted black) to be more in the correct position. As it stands, it can't go directly in front of the instrument panel as it should in a 172, because of course the rear tube slides out too far. I may put it just below the monitor, but I'm not very happy with how low that is. (I might add that one point of building this sim is to practice making the physical movements to controls as realistically as possible... I'm a student pilot.)My questions are: does the new CH USB yoke stick out its back less? Has anyone hacked their yoke to somehow not poke out so much? And/or were able to leave the yoke higher while using hardware to move the long tube further down? Or does everyone simply accept that you can't have a monitor directly behind the yoke? (In my C172 the tach is right beside the yoke tube. I suppose I could grudgingly move the tach elsewhere on the visual panel.) My other thought is... well, perhaps the yoke should sit on a platform far out from the panel anyway... but I can't recall how far it sits out in the real thing.I'm not sure I've made myself clear, but am mostly curious if a USB CH yoke would help me out, rear clearance-wise.Thanks for any input,Kevin

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On a real Cessna the yoke goes pretty close to the panel (well, so that you dont crunch your fingers on the gauges of course) and the back/forward movement is about 15-20cm. I think the CH yoke is moving a lot less.http://www.airliners.net/open.file/227301/L/ < this one shows it pretty well. The hole in the yoke rod is for the control lock you use while parking to protect control surfaces from wind gusts. It is pretty much in the middle of the movement range, so it moves pretty close to the panel.Just build a floor standing yoke like the Precision Flight Controls jetliner yoke - you need a few pots, some metal tube (50mm diameter or so), some bolts and plywood etc. - The importat part is the movement and the control feel anyway.You probably dont even need much springs to center it - a real yoke does not really have a lot of centering force, and the large movement of the yoke makes fine control adjustments a lot easier. The cessna yoke turns approx. 180 degrees on the aileron axis, and (like I wrote above already) the back/forward movement is roughly 15-20 cm.Tuomas

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Sorry, Kevin, the USB CH yoke is about the same depth as the old one.Peter Holt

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Guest kdarling

Thanks for the 20cm info... I haven't flown in a few years (new baby daughter) but I remember the yoke coming much further over my lap than the CH yoke does.That's a good idea about building a freestanding floor unit. Or perhaps I could cantilever something out from the panel. I'm convinced that a sim is best if you've already flown some. Then you realize that you'll never learn landing or many other things from a sim. But you can definitely hone your navigation skills, keep your instrument scan sharp, and (with the right setup) practice both standard and emergency checklists.That said, you've about convinced me of another reason to build my own yoke... to try to figure out a way to make the trim wheel physically work. Sims are incredibly bad for learning this, since in real life the pressure on the yoke (but not its position) eases as you trim the plane.Has anyone here (besides the $$ yoke makers) already figured out a way to do the elevator trim realistically? Also, has anyone tried using small shock absorber / lift-gate units to emulate back pressure instead of springs?Best,Kev

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Guest kdarling

Thanks much, Peter. You saved me from spending the money just to find that out!Cheers,Kev

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>That's a good idea about building a freestanding floor unit. > Or perhaps I could cantilever something out from the panel. I would guess the free standing one is a lot easier to build and looks much cleaner if you dont care about it being "non-cessna" (it's your simpit, it is not a cessna in the first place anyway) so allow yourself some artistic freedom... :)>I'm convinced that a sim is best if you've already flown >some. Then you realize that you'll never learn landing or >many other things from a sim. But you can definitely hone >your navigation skills, keep your instrument scan sharp, and >(with the right setup) practice both standard and emergency >checklists. Absolutely. My motivation is to build an interface to FS2002 where the controls and switches are more or less in the correct position.It is not a good thing when you start slowing down on the traffic circuit for landing and prepare to lower flaps a bit and the first thing you think is "F7".. (yeah, happens you know.. computers suck that way.. I also do "Ctrl-Z" a lot with my other hand when I am drawing with a pencil...)So that sort of scared me - what if it was an emergency? What if it was a matter of seconds? I would not want to lose a blink of an eye pondering about how something works in FS2002 when I fly a real plane. That would suck badly.Thus the home cockpit :-) Plus building things is fun.I agree totally with your comment about navigation skills.>That said, you've about convinced me of another reason to >build my own yoke... to try to figure out a way to make the >trim wheel physically work. Sims are incredibly bad for >learning this, since in real life the pressure on the yoke >(but not its position) eases as you trim the plane. >>Has anyone here (besides the $$ yoke makers) already figured >out a way to do the elevator trim realistically? Also, has >anyone tried using small shock absorber / lift-gate units to >emulate back pressure instead of springs? I think it even adjusts the position too (I mean the position of the handle, not just the axis position in the sim) - but I think you meant that too.So yeah, one could use some threaded rod thingy plus some gears or chain thingy to rotate it so that it loosens or tightens some (very light) centering spring.Shock absorber is a good idea. My own yoke is not finished yet, too little time for everything.. but I am thinking of using a small shock absorber since on a light aircraft like a cessna there is not that much of a centering force - mostly just "resistance to movement" - from the limited experience I have with a C172 and C152 I can say the ailerons dont center really much (you dont really need aileron trim on those planes since you can just leave the yoke tilted slightly either side and it stays there. Of course extreme control movements cause more force, but using just shock absorbers with constant resisting force probably might work great. (if you can find ones that increase the resistance when compressed, those might work too of course, but near center position the yoke should not have a strong centering force. Most joysticks have that and it makes them very non-precise since it is hard to make very minute adjustments)I need to sleep now, I hope the above makes any sense :-)Tuomas

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One question: How do you plan to cut the holes in the foamboard you mentioned?I plan to do something similar for an EFIS display (on an LCD monitor) at some point, but I'm not sure how to cut the holes and end up with crisp edges.thx,Dave Blevins


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Guest kdarling

> One question: How do you plan to cut the holes in the foamboard Good question, and I got the foamboard mostly because I already had the solution:About a year ago I ran across an amazing item at a major craft store in lower New York. It was a circle cutter! It has a clear plastic base with a internal rotating clear disc mounted like a Lazy Susan turntable on tiny ball bearings.The rotating disc has hundreds of slots marked with diameters, into which you put a special pen with a rotating X-acto style blade head. You simply center the disc, hold down the outside base, insert the blade pen, and pull the pen around on the bearings in a circle. With a little practice you can quickly zap out perfect circles.I would dig out the name right now, but the device is currently under a large pile. In any case, I would think that larger arts and craft stores should have something like this. The cost was ~$20, but worth it. I suspect it was really made for arts people, vs. hobbyists.Kev

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Guest kdarling

Yes, Tuomas, you made perfect sense!Here's my story, btw. Started flying about four years ago, got up to 32 hours, then had to stop because of job and baby. Now I want to finish my license, and so I took up simming again.But to my horror, on my first few "flights" I found that I had lost several major hardwon skills: the ability to stay dead on altitude and speed (due to lack of scanning and trim)... the ability to instantly reach out for controls (because of the limitations of keyboards, etc)... and the ability to quickly figure out which frequencies to preset into which NAVCOMM radio so that flopping them around made life easier.So all those things I really want to be more realistic in the sim. Thus my desire for a good physical layout copy of the plane, rotary radio switches, and an outside view separate from the instrument panel. (I even intend to have a "fuel tank" switch both on the center a la Cessna, and on the left like the Cherokee I soloed in.)As you said, it's not just a matter of keeping minor skills honed, but of making sure your hands "know" where to go in an emergency!Thanks for your thoughts, especially on a trim wheel moving the center spring point. I have to think about whether we'd need to add some motorized center point feedback via FSUIPC info from the plane.Best,Kev

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