Some time ago I decided that I want to get myself a wheel and pedals set for some driving and rally games on PC. I looked around and decided that DFGT would be fitting wheel and pedals set for me since it wasn’t that expensive and many people said it is good for beginners. Since the wheel is not manufactured anymore, I had to look around for used wheels on the internet. I found one for 60 euros on Finnish site tori.fi
The problems started after I tested the wheel on my computer. Initial calibration was good, but as soon as I started playing with it, the wheel started “drifting” (it lost calibration) and became misaligned. I started googling and found out that this is very common fault with Logitech wheels (DFGT, G25 and G27) and it is caused by broken optical encoder disk.
There is an easy way to fix this, which I tried first but it didn’t work on my DFGT. At this point I contacted the person who sold me the wheel and informed him about the fault in the DFGT. There is a brass version of the encoder disk. It costs about 35 euros, shipping included. I demanded a refund of 35 euros from the seller since the fault had to be present before he sold the wheel to me. He denied this, but eventually refunded 20 euros because he sold me a broken item.
I ordered the brass version of the wheel, which came in 8 days from Thailand to Finland. Very fast shipping in my opinion. Turns out, I had ordered a wrong version of the encoder disk, since there are 30 and 60 slot versions. I looked at my broken encoder and thought “well, this must be the 60 slot version” and ordered that. Turns out it wasn’t. I contacted Glenn who sells these brass encoders and kindly asked him if I could do an exchange since I ordered a wrong version. He agreed and I paid 8 dollars re-shipping fee after I had returned the wrong version.
It took 6 days for the correct encoder to arrive. It took me several tries to get the wheel working with the correct encoder, since I had bumped the optical encoder sender and receiver components. I had to bend those and get them in proper angles, but eventually I got it right and wheel started working and it no longer drifts while gaming.