Hello,
I’m a newbie. I used to work on aircraft simulators, not helicopters.
I am currently working on a H145 simulator project.
I thought to buy a “h145-2023-max-duo-twist-throttle” from maxflightstick. Later, I will upgrade it to a dual command set.
I can’t find advice or feedback about this product. What is your opinion on it?
The only revew found indicated “I bought an H135 cyclic and collective from them… and sold it. Build quality was horrible. Very cheap 3D printed parts. Delivery time was over a year and the packaging was very amateur.”
Real H145 pilots could fly on my simulator, so I need realistic devices. Not toys.
If you have any other suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
Thank you for your help
Dan
In my opinion Maxflightstick is certainly not a toy. It is a substantial set of controls. However there are some issues. I ordered the MFS Huey-configuration. It took many, many months and many broken promises before they were delivered. And then it kept dribbling in different shipments before I had the entire controls. This was voiced by a number of their customers. This was more than 2 years ago so hopefully they solved this issue. With a couple of exceptions the mechanical construction and engineering of the controls is top notch providing you attach the base to a piece of plywood or other structure. I loved the ability to adjust the relationship of all the controls to each other both fore and aft and left and right. However the cyclic grip and the collective switch box are indeed 3D printed. In the first instance, the cyclic control sheared in half horizontally when I made an aggressive movement forward. MaxFlight did send a replacement but it still seemed it could separate again. Personally I didn’t care for the dampers. They seem to have too much stiction to break out and with small inputs the controls would try and return to the previous position. I sold my Maxflight to somebody who wanted the mechanical integrity and has been successful using the controls. I also had an older set of PUMA controls that he could have purchased instead but he preferred the MaxFlight. He was a former navy fighter pilot and had just got his commercial rotorcraft rating. He was looking for a sim set up to keep proficient. Although I’m a fixed wing pilot, I only have about 6 hours of instruction in actual helicopters (S300, R22, R44) so take my opinions on handling characteristics with the grain of salt.
I replaced the Maxflight controls with the PUMA X Joystick which has a much better feel and, in my opinion, is engineered better overall. The delivery was sooner than promised. My original PUMA was not as adjustable as the MaxFlight but the latest version is fully adjustable just like the MaxFlight.
Both MaxFlight and Puma have a dual option but you need to tell both vendors ahead of time that is what you intend to do so they can provision a single control for the upgrade to dual.
Hope this helps. Maybe others will chime in as well.