After designing our own seat cushions, and choosing to use a multi-switch Tosten grips on the sticks, the control sticks that Glasair shipped with the kit would not work. The curve was wrong so the grip would strike the bottom of the instrument panel and the stick would bottom out on the seat cushion when pulled back fully. Therefore, we heated PVC tubing with a heat gun and bent it to a shape that worked to make a stick mockup. It turned out to be a huge problem to find a shop that could bend the 1" CrMo tubing to form the two sticks. Dee visited 4 shops before finding one who had the tubing bender and was willing to do the job.
On top of that, Kevin Williamson, former owner of CH Products and designer of the most popular control stick grip for computer flight simulators, designed and manufactured a Tosten grip for our Sportsman. Kevin worked with Dee and custom cut the bottom of the grip off as much as he could to gain clearance from the bottom of the instrument panel. Our talented friend, and for 23 years President of EAA Chapter 231, Ron VanSickle, made a plug to fit in the top of each stick on which to fasten the grip with his massive Bridgeport milling machine. Boy, did this whole process take a long time, lots of phone calls and miles of driving. and the wonderful help from Ron VanSickle.