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Star Wars Flight Yoke

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paigeoliver:

Actually all 4 inputs are wired separate, even for the arcade games. Star Wars uses all 4 for the same THING but they are 4 different buttons.

I actually had every style yoke in my game room at the same time once. (Star Wars, Hydra, Road Blasters, Stun Runner), and I STILL own 3 yoke games.

Tailgunner:

From my research, that's a fair price. The question is what you'd want for a profit on top of it. Happ would likely sell them for twice that, which explains why they don't offer a repro XY yoke. ;) Still you have to make a reasonable profit to justify bothering with the whole project.

The make or brake part will be the grips, as being die castings you'd need to have molds machined to repro them. Figure about a $5000 investment before you see a set of grips.  :o  

Honestly, I'd start with selling replacement parts for existing yokes and work up to actual yoke production if the demand is there. For instance, a good number of existing yokes could use new springs, gearsets, and bumpstops. If you started by having those pieces made, you might very well cover their cost of production without ever selling a yoke. You could use such a system to pay for the parts needed to build your yokes, or you could use it to pay to have other parts made.

One downside to the parts first method, with parts available quite a few more yokes will appear out of people's junk bins. This would likely drive the price back down to where a new $200 yoke wouldn't be a big seller. Then again, if half of the parts in your yoke cost you nothing, you could lower the price of the complete yokes to be competitive.

my 2 cents...

paigeoliver:

Actually the yoke rebuild kits were just reproed again. I saw the announcement on RGVAC a couple days ago. Exactly the parts you just mentioned.

Lilwolf:

You might also want to look at similar yokes.

Hydras are very different mechanically... Play different also.. So not really a choice.

But isn't a stunrunner very similar?  I dont' have one so I couldn't tell you for sure... but you might find that you can get starwars and stunrunner repos with very little different.

This might be the difference between making it profitable and having an extra 50 units laying around for years.


btw, if you could get them sold for 200 bucks and have them feel like new originals... I bet you could get 100 preorders right off the bat.  If its close, you might be able to sell them.

basically make sure that you get a demo version and play them next to an original... People here are picky.

Last...

Talk to Oscar about your buisness model.  I have in the past.  But this is a VERY specific market.  You might be able to compare it to his DOT spinner.  Expensive and only really useful in a few games..   Hes great and I"m sure he would talk to you for a bit about what to watch out for....

but again... 100 preorders and you don't have to worry about keeping them around..

and last...  (probably)...  Make sure to order 20 extras and charge extra.  Make sure that the profits from the extras can finance the next ones (in whatever denominations you want) so if you decide to continue you can... and don't expect to sell the extras as fast as the first 100 or so.  

paigeoliver:

I owned both Star Wars yokes and Hydra ones and I thought they felt almost identical, although they were built different. I do agree that Star Wars is the one to copy not Hydra, no one cares about Hydra.

The Stun Runner yoke only goes up, not down.

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