To All CH Yoke Users....Help Required!

Hi Alex.

I did this with a CH Yoke a while back, before I resorted to taking the thing apart entirely and just using the circuit boards. I have to say that I did not finish the job entirely, but in essence, this is what I did:

1. Find the point on the yoke shaft where it enters the body of the yoke at full inward deflection. Mark it just forward of that point. This ensures that any bits you add to the diameter (screw heads, bolts etc) do not prevent the yoke being fully deflected.

2. Disassemble the yoke. This isn't hard but some of the screws were very tightly stuck indeed - you'll need a decent screwdriver with a very long extent and the ability to get good torque - use exactly the right head or you'll risk stripping them. I took the yoke shaft out entirely for the next part.

3. Disassemble the yoke handle. This let me remove it from the locking mechanism on the shaft, and pull the cable out to a decent length in order to cut it (yes, you'll have to do this, there's not enough slack).

4. Now I had the yoke shaft on its own, I cut it at the marked point. The shaft is 25mm around the outside, and the plastic is about 3mm thick. If you could find some plastic pipe exactly the right diameter, it might work, but I ended up using broom-handle wood. The nearer you can get to the 25mm outside diameter, the better.

5. I cut a wooden rod to the length I wanted to extend the yoke, plus 20mm.

6. I took 3mm diameter of each end of the rod up to 10mm (20mm or even 50mm might be better) each end; a lathe is the best way to do this, I ended up using a Dremel and sanding bit which left a fairly uneven finish.

7. I drilled a hole all the way through the wooden rod in the centre - to accomodate the cable. This was actually pretty difficult because of the length involved - you'll need a very long wood bit, or else you'll have to do it from both ends and hope to meet up in the middle - use a drill stand if you can.

8. The wooden rod will now insert 10mm into the two ends of the yoke shaft. To secure it, I used serious epoxy glue, and then screwed through the plastic and wood all the way with two screws at 90 degrees to each other - in my later build I used bolts, and I think those are probably better, if visible. Possibly, four bolts in each end of the join would not be overkill.

9. I painted the wooden rod in-situ, which was a bad idea as it turned out; the shaft surface going into the yoke needs to remain paint-free. So you may wish to paint the rod before you install it!

10. You now need to splice the cable. If you're clever, you can get away with using only 7 connections even though the cable has 11 cores, since it has shared grounds. But otherwise, just use 11-core cable and replicate it exactly. If you're confident of your soldering you can attempt to patch-splice the cables; but they're very thin and I ended up using bridge boards to do it. When you've spliced the handle end, you can run the cable down the middle of the shaft through your drilled hole and out of the exit point in the shaft, and then re-attache the handle. Then you splice the other end of the cables and you can re-connect the electronics, put the whole thing back together, and bingo.

If you prefer, you can resolder all switches in the handle and run completely new cable in one piece, and then terminate it with the right 11-way PCB header plug; good luck finding an 11-way header anywhere in the UK, though - I gave up :-)

You can see an article about my first hack at this (which just covers extending the handle) here:

http://milehighgeek.wordpress.com/20...a-bit-too-far/

(BTW, the measurements in this post are not accurate - the yoke shaft is definitely 25mm, I just measured badly <g>)

and here's a couple of posts about re-wiring the yoke handles for my second attempt (which replaces the yoke shaft and main body entirely):

http://milehighgeek.wordpress.com/20...a-yoke-part-1/
http://milehighgeek.wordpress.com/20...-build-update/

(The second post there has some useful comments between me and AKMongo about the specifics of re-wiring the thing - you might consider asking him for some input too as he's done it more recently than I did and came up with a brilliant solution using Cat5 cabling.)

NH