Showroom 12v Winch Motor Driving Simpit

Look forward to the video. I decided on a chain drive for drift as a lever was not going to give me the amount of movement that I required (remembering that the seat will move less as it is some distance in front) and as it was also moving the mass of the surge table and seat mover a long arm would not have had the torque with my motors.

I agree, the wheel chair motors would not have enough torque with a lever either. I like the chain drive system and it would be simple to implement, I might even already have the parts left over from older projects. My winch motor is much to slow to really give that slide feeling. While it does add to the immersion a great deal, it is just too slow at its present state.

I am going to revise my slide system as well, rather than steel rollers which I think are starting to catch I am designing a slide with in-line skate wheels mounted in a double arc under the axis motors and another under the seat itself to better support the weight and even things out. This should give a very easy gliding traction loss system.

Hi Historiker, just for info I used small high rated trolley wheels (your skate wheels would be OK also) on a triple arc to keep everything stable - three wheels at back, two in middle under the seat and two up front for stability - although you may not need this as you don't have a surge table. Works fine so far with no noticeable wear or catching.

Excellent to hear, thanks for the update. I had 16 skate wheels on hand so....I used all 16

Well, I will anyway. I still need to cut out the platform on the CNC.

Here is the layout, one at the rear and the smaller under the drivers seat.

Still in need of paint but I wanted to assemble and test them. They seem to work very well. Even though the smaller platform will hold more weight than the longer one there was less room for wheels. additionally the smaller slide board has steel pins for added support. Regardless, the number of wheels that I mounted was massive overkill, lol.
I had 16 wheels, why not use them? The in-line skates that I removed them from cost me 6.00 per set at a local used shop so the cost was very minimal.

My goals for today:

Rework the seat sled a little bit, make more room for my legs by removing an upright post and replacing it with an angled bracket.

Final mounting of the seat and pedals. Right now they are held on with clamps. This will clean up the looks a bit.

Installation of my seat belts, with a spring tensioning system.

Addition of skin panels and paint to the seat sled to finish it up.

Later this weekend, perhaps next week:

Rebuild the base by adding a wooden raised platform rather than the single layer of plywood. Add casters.

Build enclosures for both base layer and traction loss layer to hide motors (with good ventilation).

Paint the two above structures to resemble a FiA European Touring Car racer. I have a vinyl cutter so I can add lots of little bits and bobs to the scheme.

More to come, I want to get this finished so I can get back to my 6DoF. Still waiting on my order of potentiometers to arrive so I have some time on my hands.

That's a great in-line skates sliding system! I'm impressed!

Thanks for your pics!
Your CNC gives perfect results!!

Moved a vertical support to give me more leg room. It looks nicer this way as well. Put the Fanatec Elite pedals back on their own base as well.






Drilled and tapped the frame to bolt the seat belt webbing into, as well as routered the back rest board to pass through the webbing.










Hmm...what else did I do today.....I cut and painted 1/8" MDF panels to apply to the front and sides of the top platform. They will be attached with velcro once everything is back together. Painted and mounted the skate wheel slides on the center platform. removed the seat mount and painted it and reinstalled. Created a permanent mounting system for both the pedals and the seat to the top platform frame (no more clamps).

Tomorrow, if I have time, I am going to build the base platform up using a torsion box frame and then paint it all up to look sorta race car (ish). I should be able to assemble the entire thing again and be back on the road...so to speak.

The torsion box is finished! This design will allow me to mount wheels on the base platform without sacrificing stability on any other layer.

If anyone is interested in the dimensions of the box here they are:




All dimensions are in inches.

.88 is 7/8"

Almost finished!

I still need to fabricate the box that will cover the rear end, over the motors, but I can get to that later in the week (I hope).

Thanks to my sponsors (real and imagined)

The furniture bearing that I am using: It is 10" diameter with a pass-through hole bored so I can screw it down to the bottom platform.




The platform in it's entirety. Unfortunately it is in a back corner where I cannot really get good pictures of it.







Just had to add white lettering to the tires

Love the stickers , really looking nice indeed. Be cool to see a video with it sliding around.

Rene, I am thinking of starting a new thread with information on only the latest version of this 2DoF project since it is the final (no, really) version, lol . This thread seems confusing considering I have four different projects and their permutations listed.

Hit a couple of brick walls today:



First, my server power supplies both failed after a couple of hours of use. Since both blinked back on after I few minutes I assumed that it was caused by heat. They did not go out at the same time, but within about 10 minutes of one another. They would stay up for about 10 minutes after each failure.

Since they do not have internal fan units like the HP600GB units do I came up with a silly but effective short term fix. And it allowed me to test my heat cause hypothesis. I used a powerful floor/shop blower, a couple of pieces of shop vacuum hose and a couple of miles of duct tape

With air blowing through the cases I had no more failures even after three hours of use (oh boy is drifting in Asseto Corsa hard!). I will pop a picture of my jury rigged blower system on here later, it really is quite funny to see.

I am going to retrofit a couple of 80mm fans onto the PSU cases later.


My second brick wall; I broke two potentiometers today by over tightening them. The first rule of mounting pots is to use two nuts, that way there is no torque on the pot body itself. Hmm...I should have followed that sage advise myself. I received my new pots in the mail yesterday so I decided to replace the old and worn pots (they were used when I got them) with spanking new ones. I overtightened the first resulting in stripped internals, and so of course I overtightened the second also resulting in stripped internals. DoH! In my defense I have a rather bad head cold and was not thinking clearly

Mounted the pot correctly the third time and all is well.

Just for kicks I ordered some 5 turn 10k pots today as well. Since my gears rotate 6.5 times I wanted to use 10 turn pots but it would hurt nothing to lose 1/4 of travel by downgrading the pots. I want to see if I get more precise "jitter" effect (road bumps?) than I do now. I doubt it will make a huge difference as my winch motors already have a great deal of slop (loose gear mesh) so the little twitch movements from the motors themselves do not translate up to the platform mounts very well anyway.

I really do need to take the time to make a video, the traction loss system is very slow but it really does give a better sense of immersion with than without it. You really feel your rear aspect get loose when your tires do

David

Hi @Historiker, could you provide some details of your traction loss setup (Motor & chain drive), with maybe a couple of pics if you get the chance? As I have my sim in pieces at the moment I'm thinking that this is the time to add the 3rd dof.
Cheers, Mike

@Historiker not sure if you have tested this but when the motor drivers you are using (intended for battery powered robots same as the jrks lol) let the motor freewheel as they do when the lever goes down they actual push power back down the main vin Gnd lines that you psu connect to, this is why I dont use pc powersupplys as this back voltage causes them to overheat or just straight out shut down, My winch system used a dedicate 20amp desktop power supply (expensive) but had internal circuits to cope with the back current. The easiest method is to place a small (8amp-10amp) 12v battery parallel with the power supply thus the Dc Battery will absorb the amps being pushed back and the psu will be uneffected by the back current,
But yes cooling will help them too as they will build heat with the current comming back to them.

Hi Mike, I am not yet using roller chain on the traction loss system. It is still the simple winch motor and lever connect to each side using link chain as per my previous pictures. I need to source a good strong (affordable) 12v motor locally and then convert everything over to that. It should be an easy conversion though as there is plenty of space to do it.

Rob, thanks for the info, it makes sense. The cooling takes care of any heat issues right now but if I have further problems after I add fans I will reconsider. I would want to add fans regardless of how I had them wired up anyway.

Several hours last night with Asseto Corsa and no problems with the power supplies.

My temporary cooling system, lol:

I was looking around for a good quality motor to replace my traction loss winch. I thought about the very good motors out of Australia but shipping is a killer, I thought about the crab pot motors out of Canada...cheap, powerful and looked just right. Then, my darling wife told me to think in a scientific manner to solve my problem (she has a PhD in Biology....her favorite comment to me is...."Did you really think that decision through?" DoH! .

Problem:

My traction loss system moves too slow.

Observation:

My winch motors which move the traction loss system, while impressively powerful, are very slow.

Hypothesis:

The which motors work great as AXIS 1 and AXIS 2 (lots of punishment to the spine) but for traction loss they are dismal. The gear reduction of 400:1 brings the 90watt motor down from 3939.9 RPM to a mere 10RPM. They start with a 17.6:1 ratio on the first gear set resulting in 223.8 RPM, then a 5.3:1 on the second gear set with a resultant RPM of 42.2, and finally a 4.6:1 ratio on the final gear set giving me 10 (ish) RPM. What I would really like is around 30-40 RPM final output. That would whip my rear aspect around nicely. New faster motors would fix everything.

Literature Review:

I spent several evenings with my best pal Google. No luck. I can certainly buy the correct motor/gearhead set in the US but the price is prohibitive.

Further thought......my winch motor is great....lots of power after three sets of gear changes.....first set output very high RPM with a small mechanical advantage....the second set give a perfect output of 42 RPM with a high mechanical advantage of 100:1 (ish, actually 93.28:1) and of course the third set gives me massive power (430:1) but slow speed

Epiphany:

Wait a gosh darn moment......42RPM would be perfect.....a mechanical advantage of 100:1 would be awesome.....if only I could connect a lever to the output shaft of the second gear set......why the H. E. Double Hockey sticks can't I?!

Theory:

Remove the small output gear on the side of the winch and weld a lever to it. I would have the output that I wanted for my traction loss system!

Test:

So I did! Welding a lever to the gear was simple. I was able to completely remove the axle shaft for the final gear and get it out of the way so the lever can do 360 degrees of rotation if it gets out of control. And then two hours of Asseto Corsa for the final testing.....Success!!!

If you do not have traction loss you really need it. When a $%&@@#! car comes up from behind and gives you a "nudge" you cannot tell anything is wrong until you spin out because you cannot really feel that sideways motion without traction loss. The nudge just feels like normal road bumps otherwise. With traction loss, especially fast traction loss enabled you can feel every nuance of the road and the cars around you!!

I know, I know, I need to do a video. I was going to tonight but I ran out of time. I just didnt want to stop racing. My biggest problem with Asseto Corsa is that the darn AI keeps bumping me off the road from behind. Now that I can feel the bump happening I have been able to avoid it (mostly) and for the first time I have finished out of the bottom of the pack! 10th out of 24 cars!!! Yeah Me!!!!

So, as we all know; no theory is valid unless it can be tested over and over again. So, for the next few years I plan on testing it over and over and over again



Pictures:


Before:




After: