The Hardware Review: MFG Crosswind Flight Pedals

The Crosswinds

The MFG Crosswind

A set of rudder pedals are never going to be viewed as a particularly glorious control input. They’ll sit out of sight under your desk, never being cooed over by friends who come to try your rig/setup. But damn it, I wish I had a second set of feet coming out of my torso. These things are so beautiful I want them on the desk where I can see them. Alas, it isn’t so, but the truth is that these are a very nice looking pair of pedals. Probably the nicest I’ve seen. They are now available in two colours, a white and a graphite option. I’ve gone with the graphite and it’s obviously a subjective opinion, but I think they look awesome.

Inspecting the pedals close up, I’m impressed. I’ve had a few CNC machined things I’ve bought over the years from various kickstarters etc. Generally they come out reasonably, but they often have a bit of a knocked up home product feel/look to the edges. Not so with the MFG Crosswind. You can tell it’s not injection moulded or metal and there are a couple of small laminate coating chips on one or two of the drilled holes, but the feel is solid and good and the edges are generally high quality.

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One of the key reasons I went with the Crosswinds was due to the adjustability. I’m a bit bigger than an average guy, UK 12 (US 13, EU 47.5) shoe size and the largish looking footpads along with the width adjustment and centre interchangeable cam profiles of the Crosswinds appealed to me a lot.

Out of the box, it’s pretty quick to put them together and everything is easily adjustable. The weight of the pedals is good and they feel solid. There are some spacers at the back for giving you some distance to the wall.

First (and only) problem though, I don’t have lockable wheels on my chair and like my pedals fairly stiff to prevent accidental activation while resting my feet on them. Time to order some locking wheels for the chair.

I experiment with the width adjusters and various centre cam profiles which I got with the Crosswinds and am pretty surprised to find that I don’t need any of the non-standard stuff! Your mileage may vary of course, but for the sake of completeness, dimensions below.

The footpads are 29cm long and the centre of the footpads are 39cm apart with the default configuration in its wide stance.

Resistance is adjusted by tightening/loosening the main spring which is easily accomplished without any tools thanks to a nut with a grip cover.

A few quick blasts with the Crosswinds and the feel is amazing. I need to fine tune the spring strength a few times and try out some different centre cam profiles. The configuration options for the MFG Crosswind are great and include:

• Pedal angle can be shifted to “toe out” from vertical.
• Pedal angle can be shifted so that they can be made more upright and facing you or flatter.
• Width of pedals can be adjusted.
• 3 different centre cam profiles are available (current models are 4, 5 and 6).
• Spring strength (resistance to movement).

CAMs

Let’s talk about the cams for a moment. For me, the CAM option is what elevates the Crosswinds from being very good pedals to be excellent.

As you would expect, the pedals have a bearing of some sort which rolls along a curved surface to provide varying degrees of resistance throughout the movement profile. Thankfully this bearing is mounted so that it rolls horizontally to the floor and as such is unlikely to accumulate as much dirt/dust as if it was rolling along the floor. The cam profiles are different shaped sections which the bearing rolls against and as such provide different feels to the pedals in use.

For me, I ended up using cam 6, mainly because my use of the pedals is going to be for dogfighting type games where I want a relatively concentration free experience with them and as such want the pedals to naturally return to the centre and have a bump to them when they get there. With the spring tightened somewhat I can rest my feet on the pedals and set the dead zone so they don’t accidentally activate and I don’t particularly need to focus on what my feet are doing unless I want to activate them.

Additionally, there are CAMs 4 and 5 available. Apparently Cam 4 is voted by testers and early customers as the best all round cam, but both 4 and 5 have a much lesser centre bump section and as such I wasn’t too keen on these. CAM 5 is similar to 4 but with resistance that builds more progressively as you further engage the pedals whereas with 4 there is more resistance initially but it tails off towards the extremes.

CAMs 4 and 6 come with the Crosswinds as standard, 5 is an optional extra, as are the additional width adjustment plates. Unsurprisingly, they basically do what they say on the tin and allow for additional width adjustments of the pedals, but they also allow for a bit more than this as they have multiple screw positions to attach the pedals meaning you can shift them up or down while facing you too.

CAMs are not symmetrical given the rolling resistance profiles so be warned if you decided to try your own hand at making different profiles!

The Software is a surprisingly decent part of the experience. Something I’ve learnt over time with hardware makers, their software tends to be lacking. Older versions of Corsair’s Utility Engine and Razer’s Synapse were awful. Terribly unintuitive pieces of software which worked, on the odd occasion that you happened to have been doing the right combination of dancing the funky chicken, performing the secret Stonecutter handshake, while doing a one armed handstand and simultaneously juggling fire-breathing yaks, or some other odd combination of things. Here we have simplicity in the MFG Crosswinds’ software and that suits me fine. Pedals are simple things, the software shouldn’t be overly complicated and it isn’t.

Calibration is easy and take a couple of minutes. Do note that changing the angle of the pedals requires a recalibration to set the shifted range of motion, but otherwise it’s pretty easy to get to grips with and a mostly logical software interface for calibration.

Wrapping Up

I’ve been using the pedals now for a couple of months. Probably the single greatest compliment I can give them is that they are an excellent combination of setup and forget. Microsoft Flight Simulator X Steam Edition recognises them with zero setup needed for basic yaw. Star Citizen needed rebinding for roll to them which was also a relatively easy setup. I considered having a blast with them in DCS World but once I downloaded the manual and saw that the basic startup procedure was a bajagazillion pages long and having asked a friend who flies who told me that in general, if you can fly in DCS, you can probably do an ok job of flying in real life, I decided that was a sim too far for me.

It took me a few hours to get used to using them instead of using a mapped hat which I’d been using for roll/yaw in some games (I tend to use the joystick for roll in atmospheric flight games and yaw in space flight games for some reason, don’t ask me why, it’s just how my brain is wired!), but it didn’t take long and once I was into it, I was using the pedals without thinking in short order.

I’ll still occasionally hit a hat button from muscle memory, but as I play more with the MFG Crosswind, that is becoming a less frequent occurrence.

Ultimately, this is an amazing set of pedals which anyone would do well to consider. I’m smitten and will definitely be keeping them. The MFG Crosswinds for me hit that perfect point of excellent build quality, configurability and usability, combined with not costing the earth like some other models that are out there. As such, they easily bag themselves an Editors' Choice award.

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9.3

WCCFTECH RATING

An excellent set of pedals easy to configure and use.

Pros

• Easy assembly.
• Easily adjustable.
• Simple and effective configuration software.
• Excellent in game performance.
• Highly sensitive sensors.
• Toe brake options configurable as analogue or virtual button.
• Attractive to look at.
• Cheaper than alternative high end pedals.
• Editors' Choice Award.

Cons

• Although providing significantly better value than alternative high end pedals, they're still not "cheap".
• Could do with some alternate size wall spacers but this is really nitpicking.

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