My Sim Build - Project FTO

Hi All,

Im a bit over a year into my current sim build (this is the third), so have quite a bit of progress to post and yet, still some way to go. Hopefully it will generate some interest.

I built my first sim in 2000, the second in 2015. After getting hooked on Project Binky, last year, it gave me some inspiration to start my third build with my son. And this is what we started with in March 2020:


This is a 1995 Mitsubishi FTO. This particular one is the Car of the year model. One of 500 odd made - so quite rare in its own right. Wasn't in the best condition. Passenger side had been T-boned at some time in the past and the front and rear was a bit rough as well. This will be my rig.....

So, before I get into the detail, ill quickly cover a few goals:

• im aiming for authenticity. Im looking at keeping as much of the actual car as possible.
• All the controls will need to feel like they do in real life.
  
• I want all electrics to continue to operate without the engine.
• One way or another, this will become a motion sim (I know this is a challenge)
• I want the car to still look like it could be driven out of the shed (so it needs to be tidy).

Alrighty, with the background out of the way, lets get started

Steering
So, to align with my first goal, ill be keeping the FTO steering wheel and steering column. One of the few things I was able to rescue from my 2nd simulator was the steering mechanism I used in that build:

So, as you can see, i'm using a Logitech G27 as the basis for this build. I have 2 wheels, 2 pedal sets and 4 shifters. What you can see attached to the middle of the wheel is a custom 2 sided spacer. The metal part on top of that is a Mitsubishi steering wheel with the spokes and outer ring cut off. So what fits into that centre section is a steering column...

Or part of one - like so. Why do we need this. Well, the steering wheel cannot attach directly to the end of the steering column as this is way too close to the firewall.

Going to have to leave it here for tonight. Will put up the next post soon...

Continuing on....

By now we had removed the engine, gearbox, muffler (except the rear tip), and the fuel tank and fuel lines. This leaves most of the engine bay clear and this is where most of the work is going to occur.

I'm going to apologise in advance for some of the pictures. I should have taken more early on and I didn't. So im glossing over some of the things in the photos i'm adding as they relate to other parts of the project.

Right, so this is what the actual steering column out of the cockpit looks like:



The 2 universal joints on the end of the steering column navigate through the firewall and that end joint in the picture above attaches to a spline on the steering rack. This is the next issue to solve. That spline is in the way. Trouble is, if you remove that, nothing keeps the front wheels in place. They can move all over the place if you are pushing the car. So, bit of a hack, but rotate the steering rack 180 degrees and bolt it on backwards:




Its a little fuzzy, but you can see the spline for the steering rack pointing forwards now on the left side of the picture (its the bit with the brown plastic cover). This clears the hole through the firewall and at some point if I want to I can extend off that spline and steer the actual car from somewhere in front of it.

Before we start fitting the steering components, the passenger side engine mount had to go as it was in the way of the bracing for the wheel. So drilled out the spot welds and this is what it looks like now.



All the old engine wiring loom feeds through the hole on the right hand side of the picture. Ill need to remove a lot of it at some point in the future, but it's not hurting anything for now.

With that out of the way, just about ready to fit. Lets have a look at how the 2 steering columns fit together:



So, the spline on the end of the 2nd steering column (right) needs to go into the sleeve on the end of the first steering column (left). Thing is, they are slightly different sizes. So, needed to grind a little off the spline so that it would fit. Also needed to add a bearing over the spline and under that cover on the right for stabilization.

The next photo shows the steering column fitted. There are quite a few other things evident as well

• So what you see here is a black welded frame. This has been designed to not only hold the steering assembly in place, but will also provide the base for the layers that will be added on top of this lot.

• The steering assembly is bolted to the underside of the frame using U brackets.

• There is a custom bracket around the G27 wheel. This stops it rotating and holds it in place.

• If you follow the steering assembly, the 2 steering columns are now joined with the 2 universal joints translating the movement from the 45 degree angle of the steering column in the car to the horizontal assembly in the engine bay.

• The Logitech wheel appears to be gone. In reality, part of it is still there - the spokes and outer ring have been cut off as they are unnecessary.

So, success, force feedback is delivered through this assembly into the cabin with little loss of strength. We did have to end up welding the 2 columns together in the end as the clamp was not quite enough to stop slippage. Other than that, the real FTO steering wheel operates the Logitech unit via the assembly. As the wheel is bigger it provides a better feel. The steering column weight also helps provide an improved experience.

To be continued...

The Pedals
So, have I mentioned that I hate the Logitech pedals. I guess, to be fair, I hate all pedals made for gaming. They don't work the right way (apart from the accelerator). I guess it has to be this way, but they never feel right. So, it's time to fix that. This will mean doing something similar with the pedals as we did with the steering wheel. Firstly, lets cover off the easy one.

The Accelerator
So, how does the accelerator work?. Well, there is a cable that runs between the accelerator pedal and the throttle body (which is normally a part of the engine). When you press the accelerator, it pulls the cable and this opens a butterfly within the throttle body which lets in more air. There is a sensor on the throttle body that measures the angle of the butterfly.

The nasty thing about the accelerator is that is made of thin metal formed from a round rod. Very difficult the attach anything to it without weakening it. So we'll work on the other end of the cable instead.


So, the cable from the accelerator is the one running in front of the brake master cylinder and the clutch cylinder. As we don't have the engine, we need to fabricate a bracket to secure the end of the cable (the engine normally has a bracket on it. The bracket in question is in the top left hand corner of the picture above. This secures end of the cable. Without it being secured, the cable would just flex instead of opening the butterfly on the throttle body.

So, what does the throttle body look like?


Well, like this. So instead of of being attached to the engine, its now attached to the firewall via another custom bracket. This was required so that the cable cleared the firewall. Now we need this to be secure. It cant flex or it will distort the accelerator signal. Hence the diagonal aluminum brace.

Notice the wire cable coming in to the top of the throttle body. This comes from the accelerator. This cable gets pulled when the accelerator gets pressed. This in turn rotates the butterfly and a mechanism within the sensor on the bottom of the throttle body (it's the black thing on the very bottom).

Originally, we were going to remove this sensor and try and somehow attach the potentiometer from the Logitech accelerator pedal. Thing is, this isn't necessary. It just happens that the sensor on the bottom the throttle body is a potentiometer as well and as luck has it, this is exactly the same size as the Logitech one. So, in short, throw away the Logitech pedal and use this instead....

Job done. And the best bit is, it feels just like the original pedal because it uses all the original bits.

We hadn't touched on the electronics side of things before this post. I should say that im mediocre at best with electronics. Luckily my son Cameron excels in this area (and in a number of others). So I just want to mention up front that this project would not have got to where it is without his input as well.

To Be Continued

So the brake and the clutch are different to the accelerator for a number of reasons.

• The brake and the clutch work in a different way to the accelerator. The accelerator works the same way the Logitech pedals do, but the brake and clutch have a mount point above the pedal and the pedals push in rather than down.
• Neither the brake nor the clutch has a sensor attached.
• Both the brake and the clutch have very solid pedal mounts and the pedals are made of .5mm thick steel bar.

This means a different approach for these 2. OK, so lets start with the brake...

Brake

I spent many hours over several weeks looking at the brake pedal, the brake booster and the brake master cylinder trying to work out the best way to drive the potentiometer off the Logitech brake pedal. As there are no moving parts outside the firewall that are accessible, that left the pedal unit as the only option. Here is what the brake pedal unit looks like:



So, the bit on the back of the pedal unit attaches to the firewall (the side facing away from us). The aim is to control the position of the Logitech brake pedal when depressing the car's brake pedal. This means we need to mount the Logitech pedal on the car's pedal unit so that this is possible. We also need to make sure it doesn't get in the way of anything else. The top might look promising on first impression, but this sits up hard against the underside of the dash. This leaves the vertical metal section above the pedal (with the rectangular hole cut out of it). There are a couple of issues with this panel though:

• There is a bolt that goes into that threaded hole in at the bottom of the section. This adjusts how far out the pedal comes. We need to keep that.
• The lower part of the metal panel is narrower than the Logitech pedal. The folded metal sides on the panel are in the way.

So, here is what the Logitech pedals look like without the cover


These are individual units that can be unbolted from the plastic base. Now, the pedal position in these units controls the position of the potentiometer on the side on the unit and the red piston (with the spring inside) controls the pressure required to depress the pedal. Since the brake system in the car provides the pressure, we do not need or want the piston. So we will toss that.

The rest of the process is impossible to describe without a picture of the finished prototype, so lets start with that:


So, we have attached the Logitech pedal to the front of car's pedal unit. Notice the flat aluminium bar that attaches to the Logitech pedal on one side and the car pedal on the other. The length and angle of this is critical. I spent a long time working out where to drill the hole in the car pedal and where to cut that bar. This is because the full travel of the car pedal needs to equal the full travel of the Logitech pedal. This isnt possible unless the angle and length are correct. You will also notice that we have made several other modifications:

• We have cut away part of the folded metal on the side of the panel so the pedal can fit.
• We needed to cut away the top of the Logitech pedal (the lowest point in the picture) so that the pedal didn't get stuck under the dashboard of the car
• We needed to cut away part of the base of the pedal so that the adjusting bolt could be kept.
• We had to add spacers to stop the aluminium bar moving around.

Heres another angle of the prototype unit:



Although this pedal worked, it ended up being a little noisy (slight rattle), so added a 2nd aluminium bar on the other side of the pedal and connected them with spacers. Now this next picture is poor, but hopefully it will provide enough of an idea of the final solution. It is quite a tight fit and a right pain to get out without pulling apart most of the dash, which I wasn't prepared to do for the sake of a better picture im afraid:



So this does the job. Pedal feels pretty damn good, but not perfect. This is not the fault of the the pedal mod though, another culprit is responsible:



See the circular black unit at the back on the left. That is the brake booster. When the car is running there is a vacuum inside this that aids in braking. Problem is, as we have no engine, we don't have vacuum. So braking is quite hard with little give. This is my first unresolved issue. I bought a cheap vacuum pump off ebay, but it is too slow to recharge the vacuum in the booster after pressing the brake. It cant keep up. I can try a more expensive one, or am open to other suggestions. That big black tube normally attaches to the top of the inlet manifold to provide the vacuum.

To be continued...

That's a handy link. I should be able to find something in there that will be worth a shot. Thanks for that.

I did have a look at those. Look quite cool actually. Im considering it, but there seems to be a hefty price tag associated. I have successfully moved my previous build, which was also a car, but it was cludgy. I used linear actuators to pull down the springs on the front of the car. It worked, but it was completely mechanical and slow. Pulling down against the springs probably didn't help, but the movement itself felt right.

If you look at how much the car moves in reality, its not that much. I reckon that about 10cm movement on each corner would be adequate. If work toward replacing the shocks instead of lifting the whole car, at least im not lifting the wheels, hubs and a proportion of the suspension components. I spoke to my son about the G-seat last night and he said it would be good as an aid, but he still wants to move the whole car. Im not convinced either way just yet.

cheers

dstocks

Actually just looked at the link you posted. Didnt realise there were DIY ones as well. Another project maybe.....

OK, youve pretty much sold me on the seats. Ill add that into the project plan . May still have to try and move it though as well.

What are your thoughts on pulling rather than lifting. Has anyone done that. Given the springs hold up the car normally the weight involved in pulling them down cant be anywhere near as much as pushing up the whole car as gravity would be assisting. Maybe I can put lower rated springs in and make it even easier as well.

Is all good. The idea appeals. And if it can be done as a DIY, that only adds to it.

I have already cut up a shock to see if I can repurpose the housing and it looks around the right size for a large actuator. Part of the shaft from the shock could be attached to the shaft on the actuator as well and that way the existing housing could be used. Best I could find for an actuator that would take the weight (about 200kg per corner) was about 5mm/second though which is probably not fast enough (although this was about 9 months ago). The only reason I considered keeping the springs was I thought I might get an assist speed wise on the way back up (where more weight was involved), but I guess this is cancelled out by slower movement on the way down.

Anyways, not set on any particular plan just yet. Exploring the options.

Hmmmm, that's certainly a high bar to get over. How much weight do the ones in the seat based sims handle on average. Actually cancel that, there is one in the add on the post that has that information in it

Wow, so the SIMPROU PRS200 is a little pricey at 5600 euro for 4 isn't it. Given its possible, are there cheaper options that will do around the 200kg mark and around the 170mm/s? I only need 10cm of travel

Clutch

So, onto the clutch. Here is what the factory clutch looks like:



Now, You'd be forgiven for thinking this is just the same DIY as the brake (as that's what I thought too). It basically has the same bracket, has the same adjustment screw, same sort of pedal. The difference is, unlike the brake, the pedal needs to be pushed all the way to the floor. This means that the angle of the connecting rod needs to be a lot steeper so as to maximize travel of the pedal. Here is my first prototype:



As you can see, I've gone straight through the Logitech pedal in attempt to get the amount of travel needed in the factory pedal, but no matter where I position the aluminium bar, its just not enough. I would end up stripping the cog on the Logitech pedal. So, what to do....

I can't tell you how many hours I stared at this trying to work out how to proceed. In the end I came to the conclusion that a single straight bar would not cut it. This was the result:


Now, you'll notice I've had to cut quite a clunk out of the Logitech pedal and also some out of the bracket on the factory pedal as well. I can't easily describe the action that the mechanism carries out, so im going to try an animated gif:



As you can see above, in order for the travel on both pedals to equate, I needed to put in 2 bars and without the perspex part, the flat bats would have just collapsed without pulling down the Logitech pedal. Anyway, a lot more complicated than the brake, but it does work.

Here is how tight things are under the dash:



This picture is looking down at where the dash would normally be (its been taken out for this photo). The 2 silver bits are the tops of the Logitech pedals on the brake and clutch.

The other difference with the clutch is the other end of things. With the brake there is a booster and the master cylinder and brake lines and everything is still intact (other than the vacuum), but with the clutch there is no longer a gearbox, so a major piece of the puzzle is missing. So without any idea of how much resistance I needed and no way to measure it anyway, I fabricated this:



Up the back of the engine bay in the top left hand corner of the image above is a grey clutch slave cylinder. This is normally bolted to the gearbox and pushes in the clutch fork when you press the clutch. Ive made a custom short clutch line and connected it all up with clutch fluid. Originally, I thought a boot strut (the black rod) would have enough pressure to replace the missing gearbox. It takes a bit of effort, but you can depress one of these manually. But this was not even close to the right feel (the pedal was way too light). So, added the heavy duty spring you see in the picture. I didn't really want to use a spring because a spring is progressive (gets harder to push the more you compress it) vs a clutch, which is a more uniform pressure throughout. I really struggled to compress this to bolt it in place. But in the end, still no bananas.... Is not far off, but still a little light. This gets added to the not solved column for now.

To be Continued...

With the pedals all done, we can move onto something new.

Power

So, the car is 12V and most of the attachments are 240V. Given the car normally runs on a battery + alternator and half of that equation is no longer present, changes are required. So i'm going to cover this in 2 parts. Ill start with the 240V supply.

I wanted to avoid tripping over cables and power boards. My previous sim build suffered from that and I didn't want to revisit it. So we'll start here:



Yeah, we did that. Im not sure which one of us came up with the idea. So I now have an electric car.......

The power cord travels under the car using the brackets that used to hold the fuel lines and enters the engine bay via the transmission tunnel. It then runs along the drivers side chassis rail like so (orange lead):



And then we add a couple of power boards to the mix:



The power boards are out of the way, but quite close to most of the 24V plugs.

Which leaves the 12V supply, but ill need to take a couple of photos tomorrow before I can cover that off...

To be continued...

Armed with a couple more photos now, so can now cover off the 12V power side of things. All the work in this post was done by my Son, who has just started an engineering degree. He is much better at the electronics than I am.

Given everything is coming from a 240V supply, we need a 12V transformer to run the car. So I grabbed one of these:


Next, it needed a home. Not sure in the long run this is a good idea, but we agreed to put it in the PC. This means that we needed to run 240V into the case:


So a power plug was added the bottom of the case. The transformer slides in where the peripherals would normally sit (CD). Here is a picture:



The orange cable runs on the outside of the case, but inside the other cover like so.



We tried to keep it as far away as we could to reduce electrical interference. You can see it entering the case on the left and disappearing behind the inner cover. It appears again near the power supply.

You'll notice the 12V wires coming out of the transformer has been duplicated (the transformer supports multiple outputs). This is to reduce the chance of overheating and to spread the load as much as possible. Finally, to try and keep things detachable, the 12V cable coming out of the transformer feeds into a detachable linkage:



These are amp fuses and we removed the fuse and replaced with a bit of aluminium pipe. On the other side of the fuse are the terminals that would normally be attached to the positive and negative terminals of the battery.

So when the car is plugged in at the fuel cap and the power is turned on, the car gets power and the best bit is pretty much everything works:

• Headlights, taillights, indicators and dash lights all work
• Stereo works. Power aerial wasn't working. My son pulled that apart and fixed it and it now works.
  
• Electric mirrors and power windows work
• Climate control works (except aircon obviously - but we have plans...)

To be Continued...