Warthog throttle collective mod

[Brun]

After getting very close to pulling the trigger on a VPC collective recently, I had a flash of inspiration and figured I might be able to accomplish something reasonable using my retired Warthog throttle. Don't actually do that much helicoptering so it seemed more reasonable than splashing out several hundred quid.

Spent the last few weekends on it and pretty pleased with how it's going so far. Especially the fact that I don't - touch wood - seem to have broken anything in the process.

Detail of the throttle assembly, which I'm particularly proud of considering I kind of invented it from scratch. The toothed gear is driven by the teeth on the inside of the throttle handle, which has about 200 degrees of rotation. Because I couldn't work out the tolerances for the gears, the whole thing printed in white has springs underneath and floats vertically to press it against the inner gear. It's currently using the pot from the friction slider because that was the easiest to remove, however I since realised that using one of the hall sensors from a throttle axis would give me the off/idle button so might rethink that. If I do go ahead with it, I'll add some sort of physical button or lock for the idle/off thing. Need to research how these things function in reality.

I loved the fact that I had to get my bike bearing press out to put everything together. Felt like I was assembling something very precisely engineered, even though the tight tolerances were really just a fluke.

The head was modelled from scratch, loosely using images from Virpil's website as reference (sorry). Kinda limited in options for positioning the three main buttons from the throttle since they're attached to the one board. Lucky I didn't damage anything here since the Warthog throttle doesn't even get recognised by Windows without it connected. Trigger, trim hat and button on the right are all from an old Cougar stick that I was happy to sacrifice.

Added a plate on the back to adjust the upper limit of travel. It's moving less than 50% of the original throttle, but changing the calibration using DI View sorts that easily enough so there's no need to mess about with deadzones, saturation etc in control settings.

Am quite surprised that maximum friction is enough to hold it in place, although that does feel like it adds some play when making trying to make fine adjustments. The reason I left so much shaft sticking out the back was the intention of adding either a counterbalance weight or damper, which is still the case once I've figured out the best approach.

Have to admit, I think I enjoy this sort of thing more than I will actually using it.

 

Edited May 10 by Brun