Thrustmaster Warthog Flightstick unwanted rotational movement

[lesthegrngo]

Hi all, I am hoping that someone can help me with an (admittedly minor) issue I have with my flightstick. I am pretty certain it is a recent issue, but I never looked for it before so maybe it has been there for a while. The issue is that the flightstick has a small amount of rotational movement centred around the axis of the handgrip. It is the same direction of movement as that you get when you twist the handgrip to simulate the yaw function on other sticks.

Looking at it, I see the ball at the base is moving with it, so it is not due to a loose handgrip to base screw.

Has anyone seen this before, and is this something that can be fixed? A search of the internet showed how to remove stiction but I can find no mention of this, and now I know it's there I can't help but notice it!

Cheers

Les

 

[Art-J]

That doesn't sound right - there should be pretty much no rotation unless one of the two plastic pins keeping the gimbal sphere from rotating broke, or wore out (unlikely), or somebody was a tad too agressive with sand paper while removing stiction and now each pin-hole fitting is a bit too loose (yep, been there, done that on my Warthog I admit), or the sphere itself broke. 

Difficult to say without disassembly and taking a closer look inside.

[scoobie]

Just to let you know - I've got a tiny bit of rotation, too, the difference is that I don't care. Maybe we're too heavy-handed on our joysticks, but regardless of that the gimbal on TM Warthog is by far its weakest point. If (if!) the rotation is an early symptom of the joystick falling apart, I treat it as a "chance" - it will give me motivation to buy a new joystick, and there are better sticks out there to buy! I'm too lazy to buy one without such extra motivation
Like Art said - if you're really worried and you can see the grip-gimbal connection has no backlash, you may want to disassemble the thing (watch for delicate wires inside!) and see what's going on.

[lesthegrngo]

Thanks guys - looks like a bit of investigation is in order

I'm lucky in that I have some machining facilities, so potentially I may be able to replace worn parts with metal replacements, assuming that the unit lends itself to that. I will try and search the internet for teardown videos to see if that gives me any clues

Cheers

Les

[Antix70]

I followed some guy's video on youtube about eliminating the stiction that these sticks develop, and after the video, I have some twist. He instructs you to hone out some of the openings and posts the gimbal operates through, and I think I might have done too much. It's gotten a little worse over time as well.

[BuzzU]

I just bought a new one and it has zero twist movement. Maybe it's something they fixed. They fixed the slew switch, so who knows?

[Steel Jaw]

Same issue but I ignore it.