My Logitech G27 turns 1 year old in two weeks and last night it started losing it’s calibration. I was playing iRacing and everything was correctly calibrated. After about 2 hours of play it started representing centre with the wheel turned about 10 degrees left. This shift left increased as I continued to play, making me turn increasing left to keep the car going straight ahead.
I tried recalibrating the wheel in the iRacing settings and that worked for about 2 minutes each time before it started to ‘slip’ again. I also tried it in the standard G27 calibration tool to make sure it wasn’t iRacing. I then tried unplugging my wheel, then turning the PC off at the wall then back on. All these various activities made no difference.
I resorted to the webs for my info. I found a thread on the logitech forums on this very problem with many angry posters. It seems this has happened to quite a few people and usually not long after purchase. At least I got 12 good months of frequent use from it. These other people took their wheels back for swapsies or just gave up altogether.
However, I wasn’t yet ready to part with another $400 to replace the wheel so I kept reading through the 20 or so pages. I found a post where a guy found that a screw on the motor that controls calibration can work itself loose and this will cause the problem. The remedy is as simple as tightening that screw, he said. I read through some more posts to see if others had tried this success, and they had.
Confidence up, I took to this thread and pulled my wheel apart, tightening the screw. All good now!
Update 16/09/2011: I got home tonight and played iRacing, doing a 20 lap race at Lime Rock. On lap 13 the problem returned. I noticed the instant it happened. I was in a moment of counter-steering and once it returned to straight ahead it was 'broken', This is consistent with the logitech thread reporting that the problem is most evident when fighting against the direction of the force feedback. I pulled the wheel apart and here's what I found:
Update 17/09/2011: I went and bought some superglue this morning. My thinking was to apply the glue to the cracks and hold with pliers until the glue set (a few minutes), then place the small wheel back on the FF calibration motor and reassemble, with testing. So that's what I did.
