Sunday April 26, 2008.

The pictures below show the pedal box and bottom steering column mounting taking shape and mounted, as you can see from the progress pictures these parts were cut from RHS 75 x 50 x 2.5.

Even just tacked in to the car its clear this arrangement should be plenty stiff enough in supporting the clutch and brake pedal.

The throttle pedal has yet to be designed so I’ve left two bolt holes to attach this as a sub assembly to the side of the main support structure.

Getting this all assembled into the car has revealed some issues with the design…

  1. The physical amount of travel that the pedals can travel through before reaching the end of the stroke of the master cylinders is huge (290mm, 11.4”), there’s no way I believe it could all be used in real life I am sure.
  2. The ends of the pedals are too close to the floor of the car, I had been worried that they were going to be too high, they need to be roughly 40mm higher.
  3. The face of the pedals is too far forward, allowing for the full range of motion on the pedal then when sitting in the expected driving position the pedal face too far forward by probably 100mm
  4. The steering wheel is too big at 370mm diameter and will probably need to be a ‘D’ type unit.
  5. The clutch pedal lightly interferes with the bottom steering column mount. This I should have realized this looking at the CAD model its clear they’re going to touch at some point in the movement.

Compounded with the above is the fact there’s not really that much room to move the pedal box further forward or higher due to the proximity of the master cylinders to the base of the windscreen.

I’ve a few ideas on sorting the pedal box issues so I don’t imagine the above will be impossible to overcome, I guess this is just typical of dozens of issues that are bound to come up through the course of the project.

To properly address most of these issues it’s become apparent I really need to source the seats I’m going to use in the car. Without these it’s going to be more or less impossible to 100% figure out where my seats are going to end up in the foot well.