StormILM
Charter Member
Okay, being an X-55 owner for over 2 years and seeing the ups and downs of this product (and bad luck which other owners have shared here), I have still had fairly good luck with mine holding up despite daily use. I have however noted the wear during the use which has been surprisingly minimal (knock on wood). Lately though, I have been having issues with my POV Hat Switch acting up with both FSX and DCS where panning via using the POV Hat would suddenly and without warning pan to a position then freeze. I had this happen to my old X-52 stick hat switch years ago and I simply re-mapped the views to the upper hat switch as the lower one was worn out (one of the 4 internal click switches was frozen in the depressed position). With the X-52, this happened after a decade of very hard use and I was happy getting that much service from it but in the case of my X-55, losing the POV Hat so early was too early. I was able to re-map one of the other Hats but upon further investigation and testing, I noticed that the issue suddenly appeared on the hat that I used for re-mapping. I decided to unscrew the stick from the base and see if any of the spring loaded contactor pins were stuck in the depressed position and/or not making good contact. As I checked, I saw a couple of things, for one, the stick lubricant had slowly made it's way into the pin/contactor area so I cleaned that up however, I did notice that one of the two Phillips-Head screws holding the contactor plate to the stick shaft was backed out (or never properly seated to begin with). Without any doubt in my mind, that protruding screw head was causing some bit of contact break between the upper stick segment's spring loaded electrical contactor pins and the contactor base. After tightening the protruding screw down and checking the others for a snug fit, I replaced the stick back on the base and BOOM! The POV Hat has shown normal function all over again! Now I know this issue may be few and far in between for some users but IMO, many of the issues these and other controllers have are not just cases of sub-standard parts but also a good bit of poor craftsmanship of assembling them. I have read were many folks have themselves resorted to fixing both high and lower end controllers and have found issues like this which were causing minor issues to full blown havoc. Anyhow, if anyone runs across this issue, this may be of help and I just wanted to put it out there just in case. (photos of the base screws of each contactor surface).
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