Sim Rig or DIY Chassis?
Discussion
If you can’t find what you want, build it and maybe use it for Red Bull Soapbox when v2 is made?
EDIT: I tend to waffle on, so you may want to skip stuff and get to the pictures.
Background
Ever since Gran Turismo 1 I have been hooked on car racing games, even before then as a young kid under 10 I was always drawn to car arcade games like a moth to a light. I mentioned this to my mother recently and she told me how she would have to press the throttle and brake because my little legs couldn’t reach. I would spend hours playing arcade games as a young kid. GT1, GT2 came along and I was hooked, then girls, cars and mountain bikes, in that order and haven’t really played many racing games since.
Petrol Head & Sim Racing Cheaper Than Track Days?
Track Daze
I have always been a massive petrolhead. I’ve done experience days, drift days, car control, etc, so I am the stereotypical petrolhead that thinks he is the best driver <pause> In the World. I have a local track, Castle Combe that I have been going to since I was 14 with, at that time, older friends with nice cars. So from a young age I wanted to drive around Castle Combe. Luckily I have a good set of friends and about 10 years ago they bought be an experience day… I was hooked! Another friend of mine was also hooked and a mutual friend, believe it or not, gave us his old car so we could do track days. I know it sounds great, but the car wasn’t worth much more that £500 and we have since probably spent double that on it, but it was awesome. We were doing respectable times around Castle Combe in a pretty standard Ford Puma, it surprises quite a few others.. As always though, its not the car, its the driver.
After about 3 years of doing track days, me and my friend were finding it harder to make time. He has a Capri with a V8 that wasn’t in the car, this was going on for 4 years. It became a bit of a standing joke that he would borrow the engine crane and my housemate would need it back before he had even used it.
Leaving it to the last minute
The only reason we needed the engine crane back was because it was Tuesday, there was no engine in the car we were driving 800 miles to French/Italian Alps. Needless to say engine/gearbox fitted, MOT’d and drove to Bourg Saint Maurice with the mountain bikes. Engine should be in the car…
Unfortunately that year we had to cut our road trip short as we had lost the starter motor and the handbrake. Handbrake being quite important on the mountain passes with roadworks. We got quite a few looks from people when we pulled into petrol stations, engine running, passenger standing on the footbrake while the driver opens the boot and fills up the petrol tank. Here is said car:
Putting the Brakes on – Why a sim rig?
Fast forward to near present day and the track car is on hold until summer 2018, it needs new cams fitting, ecu, alternator, etc. My friend doesn’t have the time for his Capri & the track car and I really want to see the Capri burbling along on the road again. I then thought I might try GT and eventually PC sim racing as a stop gap to doing track days… It’s gotta be cheaper.... Right?
With the imminent release of GT Sport I wanted a wheel and settled on the G29, I had borrowed a G27 from a friend and found it really good. It was the first wheel I had tried and miles better than the DS. I also had the Wheel Stand Pro, this was great, but too low and when counter steering it would be moving all over the place. I had an office chair, that I had ratchet strapped to stop it rotating.
Short version of the above
Played Gran Turismo since GT1
I’m a petrol head who does/did track days
Buying a sim rig as a stop gap until its back on the track.
I have a G29, Wheel Stand v1 and an office chair. Time for a rig.
Sim Rigs – Which one?
I started looking for rigs you can buy and soon found that I either need a horrid looking aluminium extruded rig or a very expensive, very big Obutto Revolution. It would be going in place of my current computer workstation, therefore I needed it to be a cockpit and workstation for a little bit of video editing.
I looked at all the options and had pretty much settled on the Revolution, then saw the price and size. I soon came back down to earth and settled for the Omega Pro cockpit, UK based. Black Friday was around the corner, hopefully the price will come down.
In the meantime my housemate was getting interested in GT Sport and I had noticed he had sketched a sim rig out. I didn’t think anything of it as he is always busy and while projects like this are extremely feasible for him, when it comes to time, there isn’t enough to get it done.
Black Friday Weekend
Over black Friday weekend I had been checking the Omega site, 10% discount. I mentioned this to my housemate on Friday that I’ll be ordering the cockpit on Sunday, hoping they offer a bit more discount on Sunday.
Saturday evening my housemate asks me to give him a hand getting a seat out the back of his truck. A little strange as we don’t have room for a seat, but didn’t think anything of it. Went out to his truck and there was a mocked up sim rig, with the seat I had bought for the track day car that had been sitting in the garage for a year because the sub frame mounts didn’t fit. I was grinning like a Cheshire cat.
He knew I was going to buy one that weekend, so quickly mocked something up at work and brought it home so we could test fit and decide where to go from here. The next evening I think I must have looked at 100’s of DIY homemade rigs for ideas and we had spent a fair few hours discussing and sitting deciding on what should go where. It’s not until you start thinking about these things you soon realise how much there is to think about
Wheel height/Wheel to pedal distance/Seat to Wheel distance/Seat to Wheel Height/Seat to Pedal Distance/Seat to Pedal Height.
Over the next week my housemate wanted a few dimensions and design ideas. I sent him a few sketches over WhatsApp, he wasn’t impressed and a bit of banter ensued. He wanted measurements and was expecting a nice CAD drawing and all he got was sketches on a bit of paper. The reason for the banter is I use CAD for designing knives at work and custom parts for projects at home. Here are the sketches with the important measurements and ideas.
Adjustability
I soon realised that making everything adjustable will mean we don’t have to be so precise with our measurements. How often do you adjust your driving position in a car you haven’t driven before and after 2 minutes of driving move it slightly… For me I do this with every car. It makes sense to make the wheel and chair adjustable.
Mounting the Wheel
We were thinking of how to mount the wheel, steel plate, a few holes and maybe some sort of homemade slider. The homemade slider was going to be some box steel with a few holes for adjusting fore and aft movement. I then thought about using the Wheel Stand pole, just weld it on top and then we have adjustable fore/aft and up/down.
Here is the cut down Wheel Stand steering mount, ready for welding.
Pedal Position
It’s important to get the pedals and wheel in the right place as these were going to be fixed. A few days later the rig was back for another test fit, this time for the wheel height and pedal position. We played about with mounting options for the pedals and had settled on floor mounted with a slight angle. We then flipped the pedal box (inverted pedals) and realised how much more car like it felt with the pedals inverted. That was it, the pedals now have to be inverted.
In the mean time I had looked at 100’s of DIY/Homemade rigs for inspiration and idea’s. The one thing that I thought was really good was mounting the pedal tray on seat runners so you have adjustable pedals. A pair of seat runners were ordered.
Here you can see the seat runners with the pedal plate and some strengthening added for the steering wheel to stop any flex. I was apprehensive about the flex, thinking it would need a lot more strengthening, but I was assured it won’t flex, its 25mm box steel, 3mm thick walls.
With this strengthening there is very little flex, I will get a video up when it’s all setup.
Keyboard Tray
I needed to have a keyboard tray that could swing out the way, so I bought the Omega Articulating Keyboard Tray. Once that has arrived, the mounting point can be welding on, luckily this was just another piece of 25mm box steel alongside the seat. The keyboard tray is heavy and well made. I greased the moving parts, added Loctite to all the threads and left for 24 hours to set. It now articulates without unscrewing. It is still at a slight angle and in the future we may cut the tube and re-weld it at an angle so the tray is straight.
Good Vibrations / Bass Shakers / Keep The Noise Down
Yet another world I have opened up! I have a couple of Reckhorn BS200i’s and plan on mounting one under the seat and the other to the pedal tray. To keep vibrations from transmitting through the floors and walls, as we have neighbours I bought some anti vibration mounts for the seat and pedal tray.
These are 20x10mm with M8 thread, max load is 50Kg each.
As for amplifier, I went for a really cheap option using a small Lepy 2024A+ amp and really rubbish low pass filter. I have ditched the LPF which was only a tone control and bought a Chinese Low Pass Filter. I’ve designed a case for it, soldered the RCA’s on, but haven’t had time to test yet. The shakers aren’t mounted yet, once those are mounted I’ll test it out. At some point an iNuke will be bought.
Ready for paint
Being painted:
Ready to be used, as long as you don’t mind getting high as a kite on the Hammerite fumes! That evening it was used and I went to bed with a stinking Hammerite headache, but the rig was awesome!
Logitech Pedals
A photo of the pedals so we know how they go back together, more importantly what colour wires go where. I had already bought the NIXIM spring for the brake and fitted it. It now feels a lot more like a real brake pedal, I’m not locking up the brakes when lightly pressing my right foot on the brake.
Cover for Inverted Logitech Pedals
While the cover was off I quickly took few measurements so I could design a 2 part cover for the pedals. The reason for this is my clutch foot rests 1” from the potentiometer wires and they don’t look great bare. The cover is a WIP, I’ll be printing v1.2 tonight. I’ll put it on Thingiverse once I have the final design nailed, but it certainly makes the pedals look a lot nicer now as it doesn’t show the mounting cage.
Loud Accelerator Pedal
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed that the G29 accelerator pedal is quite loud if you lift off the throttle violently, it’s a metal on metal sound. At the top of the pedal, the arm hits the cage as this is the stop point. I stuck some Gorilla tape behind it to cushion the sound, it has worked well. We will see how long it will last before the metal cuts through the tape, but it’s had 3 days of hard use and it still sounds a lot better than before.
It’s not just the big things
I hate cables, usually because there are so many cables I have to deal with, you make them look nice, blink and they are a tangled mess. I bought some sticky cable tie holders… It took me an hour to blacken 50 of these things, see the photo above, I think it makes a big difference. An hour later and one marker pen ruined and I had coloured the stickies in.
Cost
Seat £40
Seat Runners (x2) £20 ea
Anti Vibration Mounts (x8) £20
Cable Tie Clips (x50) £3.00
Plastic End Caps for Box Steel (x10) £6.20
Hammerite Hammered Black (x3) £30.48
Omega Keyboard Tray £70.94
TOTAL: £210.62
Future Mods - Gear Stick & Handbrake
We’ll be able to knock something up that mounts to the same bar as the keyboard tray, this will be done further down the line, possibly next Winter, but the foundations are there ready.
EDIT: I tend to waffle on, so you may want to skip stuff and get to the pictures.
Background
Ever since Gran Turismo 1 I have been hooked on car racing games, even before then as a young kid under 10 I was always drawn to car arcade games like a moth to a light. I mentioned this to my mother recently and she told me how she would have to press the throttle and brake because my little legs couldn’t reach. I would spend hours playing arcade games as a young kid. GT1, GT2 came along and I was hooked, then girls, cars and mountain bikes, in that order and haven’t really played many racing games since.
Petrol Head & Sim Racing Cheaper Than Track Days?
Track Daze
I have always been a massive petrolhead. I’ve done experience days, drift days, car control, etc, so I am the stereotypical petrolhead that thinks he is the best driver <pause> In the World. I have a local track, Castle Combe that I have been going to since I was 14 with, at that time, older friends with nice cars. So from a young age I wanted to drive around Castle Combe. Luckily I have a good set of friends and about 10 years ago they bought be an experience day… I was hooked! Another friend of mine was also hooked and a mutual friend, believe it or not, gave us his old car so we could do track days. I know it sounds great, but the car wasn’t worth much more that £500 and we have since probably spent double that on it, but it was awesome. We were doing respectable times around Castle Combe in a pretty standard Ford Puma, it surprises quite a few others.. As always though, its not the car, its the driver.
After about 3 years of doing track days, me and my friend were finding it harder to make time. He has a Capri with a V8 that wasn’t in the car, this was going on for 4 years. It became a bit of a standing joke that he would borrow the engine crane and my housemate would need it back before he had even used it.
Leaving it to the last minute
The only reason we needed the engine crane back was because it was Tuesday, there was no engine in the car we were driving 800 miles to French/Italian Alps. Needless to say engine/gearbox fitted, MOT’d and drove to Bourg Saint Maurice with the mountain bikes. Engine should be in the car…
Unfortunately that year we had to cut our road trip short as we had lost the starter motor and the handbrake. Handbrake being quite important on the mountain passes with roadworks. We got quite a few looks from people when we pulled into petrol stations, engine running, passenger standing on the footbrake while the driver opens the boot and fills up the petrol tank. Here is said car:
Putting the Brakes on – Why a sim rig?
Fast forward to near present day and the track car is on hold until summer 2018, it needs new cams fitting, ecu, alternator, etc. My friend doesn’t have the time for his Capri & the track car and I really want to see the Capri burbling along on the road again. I then thought I might try GT and eventually PC sim racing as a stop gap to doing track days… It’s gotta be cheaper.... Right?
With the imminent release of GT Sport I wanted a wheel and settled on the G29, I had borrowed a G27 from a friend and found it really good. It was the first wheel I had tried and miles better than the DS. I also had the Wheel Stand Pro, this was great, but too low and when counter steering it would be moving all over the place. I had an office chair, that I had ratchet strapped to stop it rotating.
Short version of the above
Played Gran Turismo since GT1
I’m a petrol head who does/did track days
Buying a sim rig as a stop gap until its back on the track.
I have a G29, Wheel Stand v1 and an office chair. Time for a rig.
Sim Rigs – Which one?
I started looking for rigs you can buy and soon found that I either need a horrid looking aluminium extruded rig or a very expensive, very big Obutto Revolution. It would be going in place of my current computer workstation, therefore I needed it to be a cockpit and workstation for a little bit of video editing.
I looked at all the options and had pretty much settled on the Revolution, then saw the price and size. I soon came back down to earth and settled for the Omega Pro cockpit, UK based. Black Friday was around the corner, hopefully the price will come down.
In the meantime my housemate was getting interested in GT Sport and I had noticed he had sketched a sim rig out. I didn’t think anything of it as he is always busy and while projects like this are extremely feasible for him, when it comes to time, there isn’t enough to get it done.
Black Friday Weekend
Over black Friday weekend I had been checking the Omega site, 10% discount. I mentioned this to my housemate on Friday that I’ll be ordering the cockpit on Sunday, hoping they offer a bit more discount on Sunday.
Saturday evening my housemate asks me to give him a hand getting a seat out the back of his truck. A little strange as we don’t have room for a seat, but didn’t think anything of it. Went out to his truck and there was a mocked up sim rig, with the seat I had bought for the track day car that had been sitting in the garage for a year because the sub frame mounts didn’t fit. I was grinning like a Cheshire cat.
He knew I was going to buy one that weekend, so quickly mocked something up at work and brought it home so we could test fit and decide where to go from here. The next evening I think I must have looked at 100’s of DIY homemade rigs for ideas and we had spent a fair few hours discussing and sitting deciding on what should go where. It’s not until you start thinking about these things you soon realise how much there is to think about
Wheel height/Wheel to pedal distance/Seat to Wheel distance/Seat to Wheel Height/Seat to Pedal Distance/Seat to Pedal Height.
Over the next week my housemate wanted a few dimensions and design ideas. I sent him a few sketches over WhatsApp, he wasn’t impressed and a bit of banter ensued. He wanted measurements and was expecting a nice CAD drawing and all he got was sketches on a bit of paper. The reason for the banter is I use CAD for designing knives at work and custom parts for projects at home. Here are the sketches with the important measurements and ideas.
Adjustability
I soon realised that making everything adjustable will mean we don’t have to be so precise with our measurements. How often do you adjust your driving position in a car you haven’t driven before and after 2 minutes of driving move it slightly… For me I do this with every car. It makes sense to make the wheel and chair adjustable.
Mounting the Wheel
We were thinking of how to mount the wheel, steel plate, a few holes and maybe some sort of homemade slider. The homemade slider was going to be some box steel with a few holes for adjusting fore and aft movement. I then thought about using the Wheel Stand pole, just weld it on top and then we have adjustable fore/aft and up/down.
Here is the cut down Wheel Stand steering mount, ready for welding.
Pedal Position
It’s important to get the pedals and wheel in the right place as these were going to be fixed. A few days later the rig was back for another test fit, this time for the wheel height and pedal position. We played about with mounting options for the pedals and had settled on floor mounted with a slight angle. We then flipped the pedal box (inverted pedals) and realised how much more car like it felt with the pedals inverted. That was it, the pedals now have to be inverted.
In the mean time I had looked at 100’s of DIY/Homemade rigs for inspiration and idea’s. The one thing that I thought was really good was mounting the pedal tray on seat runners so you have adjustable pedals. A pair of seat runners were ordered.
Here you can see the seat runners with the pedal plate and some strengthening added for the steering wheel to stop any flex. I was apprehensive about the flex, thinking it would need a lot more strengthening, but I was assured it won’t flex, its 25mm box steel, 3mm thick walls.
With this strengthening there is very little flex, I will get a video up when it’s all setup.
Keyboard Tray
I needed to have a keyboard tray that could swing out the way, so I bought the Omega Articulating Keyboard Tray. Once that has arrived, the mounting point can be welding on, luckily this was just another piece of 25mm box steel alongside the seat. The keyboard tray is heavy and well made. I greased the moving parts, added Loctite to all the threads and left for 24 hours to set. It now articulates without unscrewing. It is still at a slight angle and in the future we may cut the tube and re-weld it at an angle so the tray is straight.
Good Vibrations / Bass Shakers / Keep The Noise Down
Yet another world I have opened up! I have a couple of Reckhorn BS200i’s and plan on mounting one under the seat and the other to the pedal tray. To keep vibrations from transmitting through the floors and walls, as we have neighbours I bought some anti vibration mounts for the seat and pedal tray.
These are 20x10mm with M8 thread, max load is 50Kg each.
As for amplifier, I went for a really cheap option using a small Lepy 2024A+ amp and really rubbish low pass filter. I have ditched the LPF which was only a tone control and bought a Chinese Low Pass Filter. I’ve designed a case for it, soldered the RCA’s on, but haven’t had time to test yet. The shakers aren’t mounted yet, once those are mounted I’ll test it out. At some point an iNuke will be bought.
Ready for paint
Being painted:
Ready to be used, as long as you don’t mind getting high as a kite on the Hammerite fumes! That evening it was used and I went to bed with a stinking Hammerite headache, but the rig was awesome!
Logitech Pedals
A photo of the pedals so we know how they go back together, more importantly what colour wires go where. I had already bought the NIXIM spring for the brake and fitted it. It now feels a lot more like a real brake pedal, I’m not locking up the brakes when lightly pressing my right foot on the brake.
Cover for Inverted Logitech Pedals
While the cover was off I quickly took few measurements so I could design a 2 part cover for the pedals. The reason for this is my clutch foot rests 1” from the potentiometer wires and they don’t look great bare. The cover is a WIP, I’ll be printing v1.2 tonight. I’ll put it on Thingiverse once I have the final design nailed, but it certainly makes the pedals look a lot nicer now as it doesn’t show the mounting cage.
Loud Accelerator Pedal
I don’t know if anyone else has noticed that the G29 accelerator pedal is quite loud if you lift off the throttle violently, it’s a metal on metal sound. At the top of the pedal, the arm hits the cage as this is the stop point. I stuck some Gorilla tape behind it to cushion the sound, it has worked well. We will see how long it will last before the metal cuts through the tape, but it’s had 3 days of hard use and it still sounds a lot better than before.
It’s not just the big things
I hate cables, usually because there are so many cables I have to deal with, you make them look nice, blink and they are a tangled mess. I bought some sticky cable tie holders… It took me an hour to blacken 50 of these things, see the photo above, I think it makes a big difference. An hour later and one marker pen ruined and I had coloured the stickies in.
Cost
Seat £40
Seat Runners (x2) £20 ea
Anti Vibration Mounts (x8) £20
Cable Tie Clips (x50) £3.00
Plastic End Caps for Box Steel (x10) £6.20
Hammerite Hammered Black (x3) £30.48
Omega Keyboard Tray £70.94
TOTAL: £210.62
Future Mods - Gear Stick & Handbrake
We’ll be able to knock something up that mounts to the same bar as the keyboard tray, this will be done further down the line, possibly next Winter, but the foundations are there ready.
Edited by Milkie on Tuesday 2nd January 14:16
Looking good, but that’s Mike Brewer/Wheeler Dealer costing. Welding isn’t cheap unless you’ve got an Ed 
I have the GT Omega Pro, got it second hand...great bit of kit.
Welcome to the slippery slope, it’s easy to get carried away on sim racing kit. It’s a great buzz to race online, enjoy!
I have the GT Omega Pro, got it second hand...great bit of kit.
Welcome to the slippery slope, it’s easy to get carried away on sim racing kit. It’s a great buzz to race online, enjoy!
born2bslow said:
Looking good, but that’s Mike Brewer/Wheeler Dealer costing. Welding isn’t cheap unless you’ve got an Ed
I have the GT Omega Pro, got it second hand...great bit of kit.
Welcome to the slippery slope, it’s easy to get carried away on sim racing kit. It’s a great buzz to race online, enjoy!
I have the GT Omega Pro, got it second hand...great bit of kit.
Welcome to the slippery slope, it’s easy to get carried away on sim racing kit. It’s a great buzz to race online, enjoy!
@ Mike Brewer/Wheeler Dealer.. Guess I'm lucky I have an Ed. 
AWRacing said:
Good effort but you should’ve kept the pedals floor mounted so they hinge with your ankle, you might come to regret it later.
Plus, proper racing cars have floor mounted pedals
I certainly understand your point about the accelerator pedal hinging at your ankle. Luckily I don't wear shoes therefore my foot is able to slip down the pedal slightly when my heel is rested on the floor. I've put in a lot of hours now and luckily there isn't a problem for my feet! The brake and clutch felt awful floor mounted and certainly felt a lot closer to a car when inverted. I think it might have something to do with the G29 pedals having a very short arms, you could feel the arc of the pedal, whereas now it just feels like a car. I take your point on proper race cars being floor mounted, I had not realised they all do this, I thought it was something only open wheels did. Oh well I guess I'll have to upgrade them in the future. Plus, proper racing cars have floor mounted pedals
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