Home made handbrake

[Mikael Hammar]

Hi lads I thought I'd post a few pics on a project of mine, now that it works mechanically. I am going to build a housing for it which will hold the bodnar BU0836 with some switches and stuff later on

It's based on a handbrake from a volkswagen of some sort I think.. Anyhow, this is what I had to work with:

And it's going into my raceframe:

The red rubber bit was a test to see how it would feel to use rubber as the main resistance when you pull the lever, and it worked beautifuly but it would not stand the test of time. Small parts started chipping away from it so I had to find something else to work with. Also the springs was just a temporary solution, they were some thin weak springs I had laying around.. It will be one proper spring later on.

At this stage, the handbrake would only send a digital on/off signal through this switch:

Mounted:

It worked like a charm, but I wanted to use an analogue signal, so the next phase was adding a potentiometer, and also a better piece of rubber:

I found a door stopper that I cut down to size to fit inside the 5mm slot in between the sides of the lever. The resistance in it feels great now, and I hope it will hold

Well there ya have it for now, I'll update this thread when I've made the housing and stuff.

 

[Kris Vickers]

I`ve had a VW handbrake sat in my cupboard for months now waiting for me to do something similar to this

Looks great, good job

 

[Brian Clancy]

Good Job!

Nice logical approach, thx for sharing!

 

[chip]

Nice job (I'm working on my handbrake right now.)

So changing it to analog will make the strength of the handbrake incremental? Which sim uses incremental handbrake strength?

 

[Warren Dawes]

So changing it to analog will make the strength of the handbrake incremental? Which sim uses incremental handbrake strength?

Richard Burns Rally does.

 

[Mikael Hammar]

Richard Burns Rally does.

Yep and Live for Speed does as well. It was primarily because of LFS that I wanted to get an analogue signal because LFS has this pesky smoothing thing on all digital inputs so the signal starts off as a zero and rises with a certain speed. I want to be able to yank that thing and get maximum brake instantly

Edit: rFactor analogue ebrake functionality confirmed Problem is that pesky 3 controllers-limit in rfactor, taking my gamepad used as a control panel out of the equation if I want to use the ebrake I hope rfactor2 will support more controllers