Hello all. I have owned the Cougar for just about 3 months now. I have a small problem that seems to be getting bigger every week, hopefully you can help. Over the course of time, my stick has been creating more "play" in the center. I have probably about 1-2cm of play going right and left. Being a formation pilot, just like you, I think you can understand that this doesn't quite help much. If you have had this problem than,
How do you fix it?
How do you prevent it?
Thanks for looking.

Greetz
"ACE"

Can you say FSSB

I am posting a download link for a very informative article about the causes and solutions for center play in the stock Cougar. Here is a short description of the article:

From Cougar World:

Guillaume (HOTAS Cougar Project manager) discusses the causes of play in the Cougar and how to maintain your Cougar joystick axes. This is a beta document to be updated at a later date. Last updated 4th May, 2002

Axis Play Beta 1.zip

I hope the information helps.

If you're flying formation then a good trick that the real teams also use is to set some nose down trim in Foxy. This will totally remove center play in the pitch axis as you will constantly have the gimbals loaded up with a little back pressure. Nose down trim is also great for formation flying in general as your muscles only have to concentrate on pull and rarely reverse to make a precise push. The last thing to do if you decide not to open up the cougar and shim the pins as outlined in the file Thumper posted is to make sure that the roll axis dead zone exactly coincides with the amount of center play in the stick. What this does for you is give kinesthetic feedback as to when you're sending an input to the game. Center play isn't the end of the world if you're certain that when you feel the springs engaging you're simultaneously starting to make an input to the jet. I flew very proficiently for an entire year on the team with a stock cougar using these tricks.

Assign the following Foxy code to the two buttons of your choice:
BTN H1U TRIM (JOYY, -33)
BTN H1D TRIM (JOYY, 0)

In that code entry I show trim assigned to the real world trim hat (H1).
Goodluck!

In case you use H1 for your POV. I use BTN S1, copy and paste the following code.

BTN S1 /I TRIM (JOYY, 0)
/O TRIM (JOYY, -33)

Hey guys, Thanks very much for your quick, and accurate information. I'm sure your assistance will work. See you all around.