NathanS

I don't see why you couldn't redesign it to fit, but maybe you shouldn't. I really think swapping out the original forceful springs in exchange for that quite-weak mechanism will be a worse flying experience. Affordable sim car racing wheels have smaller than reality steering-wheels, one reason is larger wheels have more leverage and that requires larger feedback forces. The Fulcrum yoke has a much heavier (inertia) lump of yoke to move, and as the video shows, that amount of shaft travel gives the pilot much more leverage than that joystick mechanism was designed for - that pilot flew everything including the takeoff by fingertip! (the more frantic approach was sped up video).

Knowing threadlock is the solution, if it happens to me again I'll know what to do. It did seem suspicious they tightened easily without that threadlock resistance!

When pulling the yoke to its fullest extent, the as you release it, my unit developed a loud click followed by a spring ‘twang’ noise. I could repeat this every time, as long as i was moderately ‘firm’ with the yoke. I’d just unmounted it from the clamp and remounted it, bolted directly in place. So i naturally thought i must have put more than the recommended 10mm of bolt thread through and damaged something. Thinking this was self inflicted, I decided to open the case and have a look. Good news: Nothing to do with my bolts. This looks like just a coincidence, maybe. There are four points in the corners of the base where springs are fastened. A hex screw holds them in place (nb slightly larger than the small hex-key supplied). Tightening the affected one fixed the click and the twang. Problem solved! @tutmeister ... It turns out all of them could be tightened just a bit more (1/4 turn), and one of them (not the problem one) I would call loose - a whole turn. The problem peg visibly moved a hairs width when the click was heard - i can PM vids if you want to see any more of the problem.

Theres certainly many ways of approaching this sort of problem, and the more ideas thrown around the more likely a good one will emerge! Isn’t Chris lucky... 🤐 😂 The history of console controllers show manufacturers designing accessory mount points from day one, some that may never even get exploited. The Fulcrum Yoke has the bare minimum, 4 mounting holes on the base, nothing on any other face, two lugs at the end of the shaft. My geared suggestion was a thought with regards to those restrictions. I think ideally, designing from scratch, the base unit would have a lever to select the rotation range. But that’d be a new product!

Correction: Using Just-Flight's Avro Vulcan for reference, the Fulcrum Yoke has similar travel, and similar rotation (the sim looks to rotate +/- 80'). I'd recommend flying it with the yoke rather than a plastic joystick!!

Ah, true - both look more like +/- 45' rather than +/- 90'. Shame! https://youtu.be/NFGkZPPNrkA?t=1021 https://youtu.be/sLUvoYIi1vo?t=41 It's plausible to put gearing along the shaft to multiply the rotation of the input - heh, I wonder how practical that is!

I have a joystick option taken care of already. But I think I'd be interested in a yoke joystick conversion - Vulcan bomber style. I don't know my aircraft like other people - are there many aircraft with joysticks-like-yokes? Oh, the Cirrus side stick too! Is this an add-on that @tutmeister may consider?

This was all before my first flight. And now I've had about 3 hours so far. I fly exclusively in VR. I believe my old saitek yoke used an averaging technique to filter out some noise from it's potentiometers - which gave its appearance in x-plane a '30hz on a 60hz' effect. Like my other hall-effect joysticks, the Fulcrum yoke is silky smooth. My X-plane is running around 45fps, but the appearance of the yoke in my real hand and virtual hand has no lag. Nice. My 'issue' right now is mounting - I do need to drill some holes (not in the yoke!) so it can sit a bit further away from me. In my current VR position, I have occasionally 'boinked' the front-facing buttons with my VR mask when I lean forwards. Luckily they haven't been mapped to anything dangerous. Once I get it 5cm further away from me, it should happen far less and I'll fly some more. I'm more of a GA VFR flyer, not at all an airliner flyer, so you wont see anything in that respect from me - although I do have Colomata's Concorde - the yoke should work nicely with that one! If I find more worth sharing, or someone needs to see something worth videoing, I'll happily make another short vid.

Feel free!

I admit - I'll watch an unboxing video now and then. I now shamefully announce my first ever unboxing vid. There. Social media nerd badge attained. https://youtu.be/YD7PqBkYkns embedded... Hope it's useful!

HAPPY NEW YOKE I’m glad to say I got the place-order email Tuesday 29th and the yoke arrived Thursday 31st. NB: Paypal said they’d take payment from my account Jan 4th. This obviously didn’t affect when FulcrumSim got the payment. NB: UPS said it would arrive on Jan 4th. Lucky for me it was a cautious estimate! I’d posted prior that I’d message when I got my email-to-order, to help others get a feel when their order-email may be sent. But with the hiatus of UPS shipping to mainland Europe, i guess this is no longer useful data until UPS resume (Jan 4th according to UPS website) and Chris catches up. So, temporarily, orders from Aug 20 are being processed - unless you are in main-land Europe.

Ouch. Order confirmed Aug 20th. UK mainland. Wondering if that spreadsheet printout got some mixed up pages,,,??!!!

Ron, you must have been a day 1 order, surely? I think I’m almost at the 16 week wait mark. Three days after preorders opening - Aug 20th, 10:24 uk time is the date on my order-accepted email. And still no payment-email in my inbox. Sadface. I was PM’d by someone kind enough to let me know he’s had his payment email on the 22nd Nov. He said he placed his order with a day or two of the pre orders opening. But without some indicator of roughly when everyones own order might be fulfilled, all i can do is cross my fingers and stare at a jpg of a classic windows progress bar sitting at 99%. Can anyone who’s order date was Aug 19th or later share if their payment has been requested yet? I’m desperate for information!

Situations where you need to know your stick is in the center are things like controlling digger arms - where you need to release your stick, and you can be confident there will be no control ‘creep’. One of Chris’s design goals is specifically to eliminate this center ‘detent’ because its not applicable to aviation inputs. I know another joystick manufacturer has problems with their customers when their joysticks do not read a dead center 0,0. They have so many customer complaints that they feel they cant risk not having the detent. I guess for rocket powered space sims, most people would expect ‘dead straight’ for a centered joystick. If you add a deadzone to the Fulcrum (maybe because the sim almost hints thats what you should do) you’ll be missing one of the key design goals of the Fulcrum. Set deadzone to zero!! (...with that one caveat of your a/p behaviour work-around)

Thats unfortunate - its a fix to a problem but not quite in the right place. It should be the a/p that has a deadzone configured, not the input hardware. I supposed you will be limited by what the software offers though.