Iknos said:
B-b-b-b-but the wheel is perfectly fine...all yous people saying it has problems are making this stuff up!
I have the same problem. I don't know if MS fixes it and one DIY fix I saw looked like there were a lot of room for mistakes so I'm not going for that. There is a bearing replacement you can do I think.
Despite turning right to stay straight I had fun with the demo so I'll stick with it for the full game. One thing I noticed though is that when I was doing the track backwards and most turns were right turns I found the controls to be much better for the obvious reason of there not being any slack from center to right on the wheel. So maybe taking the risk fixing the wheel could pay off.
I had all the known issues with my MS wheel..
But with a bit of DIY (only minor, not done the bearing mod), it's transformed into something that is actually 'OK'...
The main issues lie around the 'sensor' that detects the position of the wheel, it's a basic potentiometer, this connects to the wheel via a small gear driven shaft.
This is a bit of a small image, but the 'rotational sensor' can just be seen..
The two issues as you probably know are
1. Off centre wheel position - This shouldn't actually cause the car to steer off-straight, as the sensor drives the wheel to what it thinks is centre (and outputs to the console as centre), it's just that to you it doesn't look centered.
The fix is to take a dremel (or similar) and elongate the mounting holes for the sensor board, thus you can change the angle of the sensor board, and therefore get the wheel to look straight when the sensor thinks it is centered.
2. Play around centre - This has two sides, the first is that because the wheel is gear driven, it has some 'backlash' as the gear's don't mesh that well, this however does not translate to any 'deadband' in control as the the gearing that connects to the sensor is much better, the sensor still detects the movement, but it just feels a little loose due to the main gear meshing.
The second aspect, which is an issue, is that the shaft that connects the wheel to the rotational sensor is just a keyed half moon shaft. The problem is that this isn't a tight fit with the sensor, there is a very small amount of play, which does cause a small amount of actual deadband.
My fix for this ( a bit drastic, but ultimately does the job) was to glue the shaft to the sensor (super glue), and now this is directly coupled which removes this issue completely (well apart from the gear meshing making it feel like a small deadband exists).
To determine if your wheel is suffering from the sensor shaft not being tight with the sensor, I think you can easily spot it without taking the wheel apart.. If you power the wheel up so that when you move it, it always tries to re-center when you let it go, just rotate it one way or the other (just 20 degrees or so will do), and look at how it 'stops' when it returns, if it returns to a slightly different position each time, the shaft is loose, if it seems to slightly shimmy when it stops, the shaft is loose, finally if moving the wheel fractionally left or right (I mean fractionally, just a gnats whisker) and it doesn't re-centre, the shaft is loose...
Obviously the glue-ing needs to be done carefully, I only applied a spot of glue to the shaft (not too much), and when I inserted it into the sensor, I kept it moving for 30 seconds to ensure any transferred glue didn't ruin the sensor (it has to move internally)..
The final 'issue' with the wheel, is that it has a lot of mechanical play in it's bushings, and the bearing mod will alleviate this, but this is a step too far for me..
I'd say that now, I'm happy with the wheel for the price, MS only needed to have spent $0.10 on gluing the sensor to the shaft in production, and allowed a software 'centering' method to eliminate the off-centre issue, and it'd have been much much better..
