doright Posted October 3, 2013 Posted October 3, 2013 (edited) To poor to buy a Warthog yet, and I had just plain worn out the gimble mechanism on my decade old Cougar. I had a T16000M I used for precision flying, but it doesn't have near enough buttons and the base buttons aren't very handy. So I thought why not put the Cougar stick handle on the the T16000. The results: Conveniently all that was needed was a short piece of 1/2" copper pipe, a pipe hanger (anti-torque in handle), some epoxy glue and an old cable. So now I have a system with about 1/4th of the advertised precision of the Warthog, but 16384x16384 is still great. The white goop is Molykote EM-30L lubricant which I highly recommend, its the same stuff Warthog users are getting off ebay. The extra stick length is great for flying Huey, and in general. The T16000m's spring is just barely strong enough to return the heavy stick to center when moved full forward. Note that the board holding the stick is slightly tilted forward to make full aft less awkward. The T16000 is still plugged in and so is the Cougar (base on top of my PC case). Since I was no longer using the X and Y axis of the Cougar I decided as a further mod to wire the throttle pot to the X axis to get the higher resolution of 2999 (Cougar advanced options) vs 256. So refueling is much easier now to find a good throttle position. Only issue seems to be a T16000 issue with the center position. It is way to anxious to call close to center, center. So if your slowly moving the stick forward towards center the readings will decrease towards 8192 but as you get very close it will assume you centered it and jump to 8192. So if you are still moving it slowly forward then it puts out readings as if you moved past center to nose down, same thing for roll (but not as noticeable). This made formation flying and tanking a bit more difficult until I thought of the easy solution of just add trim so I'm not working around center. Stick forces are light enough it isn't a problem. Creates some issues with getting the A10C or P51 trimmed out exactly for level flight, but still leaps and bounds better then a worn out Cougar. Edited October 8, 2013 by doright
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