Have a question of my own now
Done a mockup on the rig, measured stuff, great..
The mockup proved useful as I found that I couldn't reproduce the seating position properly with the last design, so it had to be changed. This is my current plan. However, in the search for good plans..
A: when I want to build in tilt for the seat, should I put the base for that on the long side beams so you can support them better for hard braking forces?
B: the pedal supports as they are now, is this going to work with hard braking forces?
Any ideas on this? I can connect the pedal supports straight to the steering wheel mounts though, that is not that much of a problem. The seat I'm not so sure of, as adding the tilt makes things higher as well for the GT position... questions questions..
edit:
maybe it is better I open a separate topic for specific rig talk?
Edit2:
Scratch all of that! I have lost some sleep over it I will readily admit. A problem I solved with this current design is that when I did measure position things is that everything is a lot closer than I first thought. To accomodate for that I worked in two levels of width so to speak, outer (steering) and inner (seat and pedals). This way there are virtually zero chances of not being able to set up the rig properly. However, as soon qs my head hit my pillow... Scratch that last one, I am to do better, with less parts!
Edit3:
Had to put my idea on paper, and didn't even have my coffee!
The idea is this. Instead of working in two width 'tunnels' so to speak, I actually REMOVED parts to avoid conflicts between them. Also, I was concerned with the direction of the forces applied to the parts in relation to how they were mounted. Also, the last design was too convoluted in my opinion. I think with the idea I have now, I managed to both simplify and get back to the premise of reducing costs once again.
Literally drawing the direction of the forces made me thinking, what would a structure to support that would look like, with a central post in it?
Indeed!
Then somehow I recollected some ideas I had before base on other rigs, where there was talk about buttkickers and making sure the major parts were interconnected properly to propagate all the things which were going on vibration wise.
So, moving the major supports back in one width tunnel, by simply REMOVING offending parts (so simple it is rediculous..how could I miss that) and connecting posts to a central one, I essentially have two 'chassis' parts. The central post is virtually a complete unit on it's own, where the seat part and pedalbox part are attached to. But, for visuals' sake, I have colored the design parts differently so as to convey my idea better.
The green parts, are one big part. Essentially, through the central posts, the front is connected completely with the back through the horizontal profiles. They are connected to each other using the orange parts. I have included a third orange part in the middle of the U shape (from a frontal view) to add stiffness.The only thing left now is to simply slide in some squares (blue) to complete the connections between the sides and to mount the hardware. Both the seat and pedalbox now come with all the tilt, fore/aft, up/down adjustment you want for free and it should be really, really stiff. Even when it is not stiff enough, you can bolt some alumiunum sheets to the L corners to reinforce their mounting, which is handy when they are on the same plane
If anyone who knows what they are talking about (unlike me so far) can comment on how feasible this idea is, that would be great.
edit4:
whoever posted this image:
http://i.imgur.com/oPvnAZV.jpg
thank you sir, the solution for the last issue I had with the mockup which ended up buggin me. The two posts which make up the sides for the steering wheel mount. The slimmer of the two is now rendered obsolete! This evening I'm going to get busy working on a new revision as a complete plan