The Yoke is on me....

Beloved Reader(s?),

Next step in my pit building is to extend my ch yoke. The way my yoke was setup, I constantly banged my knuckles on the MIP in a dive. Additionally, the case took up a lot of valuable real estate on the back of the MIP. I needed to access that are for instruments eventually. I had no choice but to trash my warranty, open it up, put it back together with duct tape and bailing wire.

I have been holding off doing this for months because I was scared of 2 things:

1. How to integrate the mechanics of the old yoke with an extension.
2. I did not want to mess around with all of the hair thin wires inside the yoke handle that needed to run through the shaft to the PCB usb controller.

I discovered an important lesson. With apologies to Master Yoda, I discovered that "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to long time abandoning of simpit projects to play Plants Vs. Zombies.

So I busted it open, and came up with some stuff to share....

1. The CH existing yoke shaft fits perfectly with 2 very common sizes of plumbing pipe! I was able to take the handle apart and very easily remove the existing yoke shaft. I then screwed in a length of 3/4" black iron plumbing pipe. This size not only feels and looks bulky, but threads in tight enough that normal control inputs will never cause it to loosen. I was able to use the stock shaft to still control the electronics and it was just as easy! A piece of 1/2" pipe nipple threaded right into the shaft! To complete the whole thing only needed a 3/4 to 1/2 reducer to mate them together. The whole assembly looks like this:

Winnner Winner Chicken Dinner!

2. I solved my soldering problem too! I discovered after tracing the 11 wires, that they all connected to 7 pins on the pcb board. I decided to splice them into an 8 terminal cat 5 jack at the handle end. Then I ran a peice of cat 5 cable through the shaft, and plugged it into another cat 5 jack which was wired to the yoke pcb. Now I have a system that is mechanically easy to take apart for repairs, or to get out of the way of other installations, that works great! Here is a picture of the yoke handle wiring.

That is all for now, Gentle readers. Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down!