Finally – after waaaaay tooooo many years – I finally got started on making my now yoke. Turned out is not was all that difficult.

My “Quick ‘n’ Dirty” plan was to make the yoke-mechanism from what I had laying around – and from trail and error to some extend. See the video for some inspiration how how to make your own.

The video is from our workshop that also acts as storage for all my tools, gardening equipment, wires, building materials, bicycles and all other things that we have laying around. It is always a mess out there. So better just focus on the yoke mechanism in case you have some sort of OCD. 🙂

I had gas-dampers laying around and ended up using them in stead of springs. They are a whole lot better. But in case you do not have dampers springs or rubberbands will be just as good.

The yoke/stick got wrapped in I piece of tube. I had some plastic down pipe (The pipe that transports rain from your roof) laying around. Getting that tube in place and get the final wiring done took some time. Then it was finally time to mount it in the cockpit.

To mount it in to the cockpit it required that I made a huge hole in my cockpit-base (Which sits 25 cm above the floor). I used drawings from Marcus Pilot. Marked the coming hold with masking tape. Measured again. And slept on it. Measured again. I guess making a 20x50cm hole in the cockpit is a big deal. I made the hole and got ready to plunged the yoke in.

Well. It turned out that a beam from the cockpit-structure was passing right through the hole. Bummer. There was no other solution but to cut out a huge trunk of the support and then reinforce it when the yoke was in place. When I made the frame 6 years ago I tried to leave room for a yoke at a later point. But apparently not enough as I was missing a few inches. But my problems did not stop there.

Apparently my calculations was off by 10-15 centimeters. I was not able to push the yoke forward without hitting the screens in the Main Instrument Panel. So once again a lot of train and error. Fastening the yoke in to the cockpit base with screws – only to realize it had to go even further back. I ended up with like 4 rows of routing holds before I could say “that is it”. What I thought would take about an hour ended up taking an entire day.

I still need to 3d-design some sort of mounting-bracket and then some bicycle tube to make it look nice where the yoke meets the floor.

But right now it is time for a flight.