miningkkm1120 wrote:Is it impossible to return to the center completely with the soft center cam?
Short answer: It is absolutely possible for the stick to return to center with a soft cam. I use soft center Space-cams and my stick returns to dead center every time I simply let it go from full deflection.
It all depends on your spring-strength and clutch-settings. If you set your clutches too strong for your springs, the clutches will overpower the springs and make the stick return to center only very "reluctantly". If you set your clutches softer or turn them off, the springs will have an easier time pulling the stick back to center - if you go too far with this, the stick will only have minimal dampening and when you let it snap back to center will wobble there before settling into dead center. See my YT-vid linked at the end of this post.
Before you even start worrying about the cams, what you want for most applications is a good combination of spring- and clutch-strength - one shouldn't overpower the other. When I say "most applications", I'm thinking fixed wing aircraft and such where you want a little (or a lot, depending on personal preference) stiffness in your stick.
Perhaps it is easier to describe the difference in feel and behavior between soft and hard cams from the perspective of pushing the stick out of dead-center or pushing through the dead-center-position. With a hard cam there is a much more pronounced "notch" at the center. On the one hand, this notch gives you an unmistakable tactile feedback that the stick is at dead center, on the other hand you have to push through that "notch" at the center when you go from full forward to full backward on Y or from full left to full right on X. It's also very noticeable when the stick is at center and you want to move it out of the center position.
I would imagine this is useful for folks who run light springs and clutches, like for flying helicopters. For my purposes (fixed wing aircraft, mostly WW2-stuff) and my spring/clutch setup, I can't really use hard cams because it doesn't feel right to me, having to push through that notch every time I push the stick through the center position. That doesn't mean that my stick doesn't return to center - it does so very reliably and I *think* even the soft space cams I use have some sort of very mild "notch" at the center, but I could be wrong and it's hard to tell with the strong springs and clutches I run, anyway.
As fallout pointed out, it's not the cams that are primarily responsible for centering your stick. It's your springs. My setup with a MCGP and a 100mm extension is 50+40 springs on Y, 30+40 springs on X. After I had settled on my spring strengths, I dialed in the clutches so that they would give me as much dampening as possible without overpowering the springs. Meaning if I let go of the grip from full deflection, the springs will reliably pull the stick to dead center every single time (I use VKB Config's axes testing tab while adjusting the clutches to verify this behavior). The springs pull the stick back to center while the clutches will prevent the stick from snapping back to center in an uncontrolled fashion and keep it from wobbling when it reaches the center position.
This was shot before I added the extension, so I was running different springs (40+20Y, 20+30X - which was still pretty stiff for an extension-less GF). I already used the same Space-S (soft) cams as I still do and as you can see, the stick returns to center very reliably when I let go of the grip:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lzW_tFsy6a0This is how a halfway decently dampened GF should behave, IMO. The clutches control the motion of the stick and prevent it from wobbling around at the center. Note: I did clean and re-grease my clutches with Nyogel, so I'm not sure how a "vanilla" GF would behave.
You can also see that the X-axis is less stiffly sprung and less dampened than the Y-axis, because the stick wobbles a little more when I pull it left or right and let it go.
With the same Space-S cams but only stock springs (single #20 on both axes) *and* with both clutches completely disengaged, this is what the same stick looked like (ignore the Gladiator at the beginning of the clip):
https://youtube.com/shorts/bq0s7tW5nMIS.