Having soldered the G940 throttle twice, I can understand the frustration.
But why throwing away valuable resources?
Seriously: why don’t you put it on eBay/CL/etc for free or ridiculously cheap and make a tinkerer or virtual pilot with less ambition and more tolerance to hardware failures really happy?
Btw: one day I will dedicate a shelf in my man cave to my veteran devices, crappy as they might have been we went through quite some adventures…
You will love the Crosswinds. I am super happy with mine.
I made a base for them, which is what Milan suggests - he keeps the postage cost to a minimum by not including a heavy base.
Nice job Bearhedge. With my setup, I have a thin carpet mat so that my office chair doesn’t mark up the laminate flooring. So, I just removed the small rubber squares from the base of the pedals and replaced them with Velcro. It works great.
Completely valid point. Why add to a landfill when someone else might find these things useful? I’m not proud of it. I can only say that the wasteful act of shoving such sources of frustration into the trash immediately erased the frustration.
Yesterday the weather finally improved enough to allow me to do some work in the hangar. I spent the whole day removing lines and extracting and retiming the left mag. In the dark I pushed the Pitts into the snow and ran the battery dead trying to get it start. I pushed it back into the hangar and thought, “I could light this worthless mess of wood and fabric on fire right now and drive home with my sanity intact.” Fortunately my impulse to trash toys that aren’t working has a limit.
[Oh, let me admit one little lie so that I don’t sound like a complete asshat. One of the new G940’s didn’t get tossed and was instead saved for my friend Luke/“Requiem” who harbors a futile plan to mod it as a floor-mounted center stick.]
Sometimes there is a selfish, cathartic release associated with that that I’m guilty of indulging in on occasion. Just last week, my wife brought down a box of r/c toys from my son’s bedroom that were in various states of brokenness, lost controllers, and just plain awful toys from China. I looked at them all and had a ten second debate - do I go through all of them, find out which ones are working, which ones have controllers, put batteries in them to test them, and then take them to Goodwill…or chunk them in the dumpster? It was the end of a long day, my frustration with the self-induced “junk” in our house was getting to me, and in that moment, I decided to just part and parcel put them in the garbage. Was it the right thing to do? Probably not…but man, it felt good.
You guys will probably murder me for this one…but I actually threw out all of my old manuals a few years ago except for some of the select ones that I hope to eventually get to. EECH, Jane’s, EAW, Falcon 4, GraphSim…all of them went in the bin. I hung on to Dangerous Waters and a couple others…but I hadn’t touched them in almost ten years. Would I ever touch them again? Probably not. Are they treasures? Not where they were being stored. Do I miss them? Not one bit. I have too much content from the past few years to keep me busy…I can’t live THAT far in the past (he says as he tweaks his EECH.ini file)…
So yeah…I’m there with ya’. Sometimes I wish I had a garage. Then I look at all the useless crap I have…and I know a garage might not be the best idea (thread hijack - shows us your garages guys!)…
Yeah, getting old I collect too much crap. I actually make myself throw away clothes (or give them away if I can) every time I buy new clothes. But controllers are my weakness.