DIY Pendular Rudder Pedals

Added dimensional drawings for a couple of parts; L-levers and T lever. They are with the cad downloads post.

DoH! I forgot to order lock nuts for the 1/4-28 threaded rods. I do not have any around the shop (lots of 1/4-20) so will need to make a trip to a hardware store. If you have not yet ordered your rod ends you might want to order some lock nuts as well as my rod ends fit a bit loose on the threaded rod.

Great info..
I am getting my BOM together.
Will a single piece of 12"x 24" x .125" aluminum plate be enough for all the cut parts?
Rod ends are available from Grainger here in town.
I was going to cut the round spacers using a hole saw on plywood.
I am starting on the 3d printed stuff today..

If I had the right kind of aluminum I would have done a lot more from that rather than 3d printing although I expect everything to work fine with the plastic.

I would assume that if you are using 1/4" then you only need one layer per side for the L-levers. You would need to lay out the parts, including the T-lever I assume, to make sure they can be cut out of your piece of aluminum. Off the top of my head it sounds like enough if you are indeed using one lever per side.

No I think cutting the .25" plate may be too difficult. The .125" would be easier on my bandsaw (complex curves).
How thick are the 1/4 x 1/4 magnets?
Can you indicate how many pieces of each stl file needs to be printed?
A complete BOM would be useful. lol more work...

1/4" they are cubes.

four bearing housings, two spacers same size as the bearing housings, two skate bearing housings two linear potentiometer sets one potentiometer cap.

I printed up the left pedal and some spacers.
I use Pet-g plastic also.
They turned out very nice.
I mirrored the left pedal to make a right pedal and started the 13hour print.
The 3D printer is really a great tool. It does all the fabrication work.
Thanks to you for all the stl files.

Nice!

Actually, I forgot that the pedal model was in there. Not sure if it was the one that I edited to fit bearings or not....hope you made sure that it was something that you could use.

By the way, I did not create the pedal model. I found it online and edited it to fit my needs. And never got around to making one. It was posted on the DCS forums after I posted pictures of my pedals.

It looks like it has a bearing pocket

Good, that was the one that I edited.

What was the orientation of your print? Was it laying flat with a raft (support) under the thick end?

I just let the program calculate the supports. (I use simplify 3d)
I set the orientation as in the pic.
Yes all the supports were on the right side.

What fill rate did you use?

25%fill 3tops 3bottoms 2 shells

I am trying to get a BOM just on the Bearings..
4 total 12mm x 28mm x 8mm Bearings for pedals
2 total 12mm x 32mm x 10mm upper L arm
2 total 8mm x 22mm x 7 mm Skate Board bearings / Rear pot bearings.
Best guesses derived from examining all the drawings..

I identified a problem with my linear hall effect potentiometer design. If you roll the pedals back toward you too far accidentally the pot will actually start increasing again. Probably not an issue for toe brakes but I still wanted to keep this from happening. I will update the original post to add this STL file.

I created a bolt on stop for the rack gear.

Before:



After:

Looks good. I used these:

1 3/8" x 1/2"
https://www.ebay.com/itm/LOT-OF-4-F...813717?hash=item20c4bf2155:g:GNUAAOSwq7JT~MBb

1 1/8" x 1/2"

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Qty-2-FR8Z...m=371525727943&_trksid=p2047675.c100010.m2109

I like flanged bearing. I wish I had ordered those....
I found 2 things you might want to look at..
The rack is a bit wide and I had to sand it down on the disk sander. (easy)
The clearance on the inside of the gear was too small and I had to widen it out a bit to allow it to rotate freely. ( A bit more involved as it has to chucked up in a lathe type configuration..

I did sand the sides of the rack gears due to spread on the 3d printer but I had no issues with the gear at all.

Here are some pictures of the Hall/ Potentiometer assembly.
The Hall sensors themselves are very tiny.
The 1/4" cube magnet is configured so that N pole and the S pole runs left to right not front to back.