I was recently made aware of a mod for the Thrustmaster Warthog throttle that updates the afterburner detent from the clunky/clumsy “lift and push” transition, to a smooth transition that just requires a little oomph.
One way to is to take out a little doohickey from inside your joystick and carve/scrape/sand away at it until you get the desired effect. One of the side effects of this technique is that you can remove too much material and be forced to find another doohickey somewhere on the internets.
Since Santa brought me a 3D printer, however, I have the luxury of being able to print my own doohickey.
Like most things on the internet, I chose to steal someone else’s great idea, so I downloaded sniporbob’s STereoLithography (STL) file from thingverse,
The readme that comes with the file is pretty sparse, but sniporbob’s notes on the thingverse page are complete - more than detailed enough to give me the confidence to give it a go.
The doohickey is pretty tiny and only took about 30 minutes to print. I used a medium fill hexagon pattern to ensure it would be durable enough to take lots of A/B cycles.
The final piece looks very similar to the original, with some cosmetic differences that don’t play a large structural role. The biggest difference is the angle of the dangle on the little “wings” to the right of the doohickey in this picture. When installed in the throttle base, these wings are the ramps that the throttles have to slide over to get to the max position. If you flip the doohickey so the wings are to the front, the throttles can be smoothly pushed all the way to max with no detent. Install it with the wings to the rear, however, and the throttles have to overcome the ramp to move all the way up.
The original piece had a strong square edge, requiring the throttles to be lifted up to clear them. Sniporbob’s has a ramp edge, giving some resistance when the throttles first hit the stop, but the ramp enables you to just push throttle over with a little more force, and, most importantly without lifting them up.
Installation was a bit tricky in that the part was too large to easily fit in the channel. I had to break out the sandpaper to take off some material before it would fit snugly but not too tightly.
As installed, the pressure required to push the throttles over is rather firm - I occasionally slide the base around - so I’ll want to pull the doohickey back out and sand it down a bit more, but I can see this being a useful mod.
Just like the original doohickey, I can flip my manufactured part around and still get smooth travel all the way to max, with no detent at all.
