Making The Pedals

Pieces cut to size ready for assembly

I have finished making the actual pedals, but putting this stuff together takes a lot more time than it may seem. The pedals themselves are made from 2” wide 1/8” thick aluminium flat plate.

I have made the accelerator pedal about 160mm long and the brake pedal is 75mm long. These sizes are based on the measurements I made of my real car.

The pedals are attached to the pedal arm via a small length of aluminium rectangle section – cut from the same piece I used to make the load-cell bracket for the brake. To keep the surface of the pedal flat, it is attached using M4 countersunk allen bolts, 16mm in length. I got the bolts off ebay as they are a bit hard to find in regular hardware shops.

 

Each pedal uses four bolts to attach but the accelerator pedals have a pair of 'dummy' holes which will allow me to fix the pedal higher or lower on the attachment point if needed later on.

The attachment piece is fixed to the pedal arm by two standard M4 nut and bolts*. I drill more holes than needed to give me the possibility of repositioning higher or lower on the pedal arm later on. Drilling holes in metal requires the use of a centre punch. I mark out the positions in the metal using a square, marking lines with the point of a compass. I then centre punch the point where the centre of the hole will be. I drill a small (about 2mm diameter) pilot hole before re-drilling with the size drill bit that I need. I find that with this method the drill goes through the metal in barely a few seconds and is no trouble really at all.

Marking out is probably the most important, especially when you need holes in two different pieces to match exactly. I always take a lot of care and time over marking out the holes, although I still don't get it 100% right and sometimes find the process slow and frustrating. But, if I rushed ahead and made a mistake ruining the piece, it would mean all the time spent cutting/drilling that piece so far is wasted.

Marking out holes on the pedal arm

*As a side note on the standard M4 bolts – I brought some of these off ebay also, got a job lot of 20mm long ones, although in retrospect 16mm would've looked better and given a little more room to fasten up. Trying to get a spanner down inside the pedal arm to fasten up turned out to be a right PITA. I would've been better off with shorter allen bolts. 

Also got a job lot of M4 nuts from a site called technobots – along with some other interesting bits and bobs which I will talk about later.