I'm a keen sim-racer (see you on iRacing sometime!) - I've been using a cobbled together rig for years. So, after having fun building a kayak rack (first build) - I decided to try to build a sim racing rig. I watched this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3yonUZVMew - but decided I wanted to challenge myself to something a bit more fun. The main thing I wanted to try was pipe bending...
After chatting with Jake @ maker pipe and realizing I wouldn't be able to do greater than 90-degree small radius bends I designed this model in Tinkercad:
And here's how it turned out:
And then I added a laptop to the side:
Some notes:
I made it too long - it sticks out too far beyond where the pedals are. To shorten it I would have had to re-bend the pipes. And I didn't want to do that...
Making the bends was difficult! When I got a bend over about 70deg I always ended up kinking the pipe 😞 - but that doesn't really matter all that much.
What was most difficult was the second (and then third) bends in the upper pipe - getting the bends to be all in the same plane was a challenge.
I first made it too tall - I solved this by increasing the bends in the "nose" - but then I had to re-bend the platform for the wheel. Despite trying to alter the original bend I ended up with a third bend in this pipe - but both sides match quite closely and it's kind of cool looking anyways.
A big thing in this design is the lack of a way to easily change the height of the wheel. Lesson learned for next time.
Another lesson learned was that I should have measured the overall dimensions more closely (i.e. not made it too long and too tall to start with!)
The seat mount is the same as Jake (is it Jake in that video?) did. However, I bought a racing seat and cover from JEGS - and that has holes on the bottom for mounting.
The monitor mount was the same as Jake - but I couldn't get the horizontal stiff enough. I could have put a second pipe on the Walmart bracket - but I didn't have the parts on hand - so I just put a couple of supporting arms from the uprights.
I ended up not needing much in the way of bracing (less than I designed). Even though the rig is not "solid" to the touch it works fine when racing (I have a direct drive wheel with 7Nm of torque).
The long piece of plywood with the pedals mounted to isn't final. I'll clean that up at some point. I also bought some black and yellow heat-shrink to jazz it up a bit. Not sure if I'll get around to that or not.
It was a fun build! I took my time and did it over a number of weekends - a little bit at a time.
Now, I've got to decide what next.