Hello friend. Ever wished you could drive the cars the way we do it in the real world? Here I will give you a brief guide for building a steering wheel which has got not just a steering brake and gas pedal, but a Clutch, and yeah a gear box too. It wont cost you more than $10, if you have the most essential tools readily available like saw, screw driver and the like.
Its not only damn cheap, its very much like the same gaming / racing wheel that you purchase for 100+ dollars. The only major difference is that our gaming / racing wheel has got no force feedback mechanism. Its no big deal unless you are a very serious gamer and has got enough money to spend on a Logitech G25 or the like. Here go the highlights and features that the gaming / racing wheel you build will have
· Steering wheel with around two full rotations (720 deg) in both directions as in a real car
· Seperate Gas, Brake and Clutch pedals
· A gear box with sequential shifting
Constructing the Steering wheel:
Fetch a plastic / PVC pipe of 2cm diameter (approx) and length 80cm (approx). Light up a candle and heat the pipe from one end to the other end. While heating, slightly bend the tube in increments so that when the whole length gets heated and bent, it takes the shape of a gaming / racing wheel, with open ends. Now heat one of the open ends of the pipe and push it on the other end, so that the ends overlaps and the pipe closes into a wheel. Let it cool. Now wash the pipe and dry it with a towel. Apply super-glue to the joined ends to strengthen the bond.
Take a plywood piece of length 20cm and width 5cm and place it at the center of the wheel. Use M-seal or any similar hard mass forming adhesive (used in plumbing) to fix the plywood to the ends of the gaming / racing wheel.
Constructing the Steering Base:
Now that the gaming / racing wheel has been made, lets build the steerings base. Take a card board box of approx 30cm x 20cm. Make sure that the box is firm enough. Now take two metal pipes (aluminium preferably). The larger pipe should have around 3cm diameter and the smaller one having 1cm diameter. The larger metal pipe should have a length not less than 20cm and the smaller pipe should have a length not less than 30cm.
Make a hole at the center of the box and pass the larger pipe through it so that only 1/3rd of it remains outside. Place the pipe slanting slightly kolonisten van catan upwards. Fix the pipe on to the box using the hard adhesive (Mseal). When the adhesives cures, you can pass the smaller metal pipe through the larger one attached to the box. Attach the smaller pipes outside end to the wheel’s plywood base. Now you should be able to rotate the wheel freely on its base. If the rotation is not smooth, you can put more adhesive and file it up near the contact points where the larger pipe meets the smaller one.
Building the steering wheels Internal Assembly:
For constructing the steering wheels internal assembly we need a few more components. We need a 10K potentiometer and a pair of gear wheels. The 10K POT you can purchase from any electronic spare parts shop. The gear wheels you can either purchase or get from some old toys. The gear wheels should be such that one is atleast four times larger than the other, but at the same time their teeth should couple well.