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…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
- The steering wheel is too big at 370mm diameter and will probably need to be a ‘D’ type unit.
- 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.
a design aspect I’ve been working on a bit lately is the bodywork.
This is proving troublesome as I am not in the least bit artistic and my chosen tool to date is not a ‘real’ surfacing program. Essentially I’m not happy with most of the work done to date. If you take a look at the picture below for example to me its pretty average…
More work definately required there, but then if you look at this…
It doesn’t look that great either, but of course in real life it looks like this…
Which is pretty darn good looking if you ask me. So how to separate a design that IS rubbish from one that looks rubbish in CAD is clearly a problem I will need to sort out at some point.
Since the last post I’ve engaged an Engineer to review the car, he’s been and inspected the progress to date and so far so good.
To me this is a major milestone as I really pushed to get all the welding done on the main frame before he came over.
Since then there’s been spotty progress as I’ve needed a bit of a break from the project, being sent to Manila for a week on business and having to sort a few things on my motorcycle provided that, so now it’s back to the project…
One of the things you don’t realize about a scratch built project until you are there is the repetative nature of the job, i.e. for the frame, cut fit and tack weld in a tube repeat 200 times to finish, fully weld tubes repeat 200 times to finish…
Below is another example of this, this is the start of the 16 suspension attachment brackets, they’re cut from 75 x 50 x 2.5mm RHS, the holes you can see are in the base of the bracket as they mount against the frame tube. That’s 48 holes measured, marked, center punched and drilled, just counting the ones I needed to do and not the 18 I put in the wrong side of the part.
Eventulally the parts will look like this (mostly)…
There’s actually 5 different variations used but they’re not that much different from each other. As you can see most of the metal will be cut off the part before its finished.
At this stage there’s little more to do than clean the sharp edges off of the things. The plan is to leave them as is until the suspension mounting location jig has been completed. Once this is done I can then use moving the location of the pivot holes in the brackets to remove construction inaccuracies that I’m sure have crept in so far.
Next in the list of things to do is the pedal box and steering column mounting brackets. Again to be fabbed out of cut down 75 x 50 x 2.5mm RHS.