Racing Simulator Handbrake Mod

These are the micro controllers i started off with.
Cheap chinese knockoffs from eBay.com.
I went though a pack of these in just a few days, should have known better!

I bought a pack of 5 and went through the lot in just a few days of testing!
To be honest i wasn’t supprised… i adjusted and re-adjusted things over and over, replaced the micro switches when i smashed them to bits on two occasions.
They are too small to take the abuse of pulling hard which for me is part of the experience, in my Mk4 Golf V6 4Motion i developed a modified shift tower and bought a quick shift kit from Forge Motorsport which made the gear changes extremely tight and snappy, i could yank as hard as i wanted changing gear without issue being scared of breaking something, i wanted the same feel in the racing sim I wanted to get rid of everything that reminded me it was just a game, having to be conscious of being fairy like was the first thing that bugged me.

I couldn’t think of a quick, simple and neat looking solution to make these mini micro controllers work so another hunt on the forums for other people ideas and frankly they were mostly quite the same, something levering against the micro controller, all with some flex all with some issues. I wanted this sorted one time!

I scoured eBay for another micro switch £3.99 later and…..

what i thought was a medium sized roller plunger switch, something a little stronger that would take a battering, arrived and…. ended up being… well massive!
Way bigger than i expected, should have guessed with the 15Amp current capacity.

The new setup i came up with uses threaded bar straight through the micro switch, All it took was drilling an extra hole on each side of the frame and drilling out the metal inserts on the micro switch for the m6 threaded bar to fit through, could have used a m4 but was all i had to hand at the time.
I even managed to get some thread to bite into the plastic casing and its absolutely solid as a rock now.
The action isn’t as sweet as it was connected to the master cylicder, Its lost that cushion feel you get with the internal spring and minimal air pressure build up from just the red bungs in place.
To keep the arm from coming back i DIY’ed a spring across from the old now unused bolt hole of the master cylinder, I first went with a “double spring – to – threaded bar” approach but realized the noise of the spring rubbing on the casing would drive me crazy.
I still have to trim down the threaded bar, but for now i’ve covered the sharp ends using nylock nuts for testing. The inner nuts and spring washers were a safety though as i didn’t want to just rely on the small amount of bite i gained threading the bar through the plastic casing of the Micro switch

I wired this in the OFF position so that pulling on the lever disengages and closes the circuit, This is a (SPDT) Single Pole Dual Throw unit, It has 3 terminals as opposed to the usual 2 you might find on a switch, it can be wired in both directions of travel, so in simple terms you can wire this to switch on when you push down on the plunger or… switch on when you release it.

On first having a look at how i was going to make it work i realized i possibly had to loose the hydro side of things, i knew it would be awesome to use as it would take any abuse i gave it, its chunky and very well built, but sadly i couldn’t see it working at all with the brake cylinder in place, it had to go

I found a kit designed for locking up the front brakes for doing burnouts that uses a hydraulic switch to illuminate an LED to warn the system is active, this would of been an interesting way to achieve the same thing using the master cylinder some hard lines and a machined block but these kits arnt that cheap at over £30 and I didn’t want to invest that much money or time into something that could be done in a much simpler cheaper way.
Im still rethought the whole idea of keeping the hydraulic cylinder, i do really like the feel it gave. I may revisit the hydro side of things and might make my own hard lines into a machined aluminium block that would simulate pressure buildup, but instead of a switch i would want to try a rotary encoder. Not very useful for the xbox as your limited to 3 axis (don’t understand the restrictions on xbox one key bindings, especially in Forza7) but im already thinking to move to PC sim racing as the options are limitless and button boxes come into play! I’m thinking whole dash build.

The micro switch is wired directly onto the traces on the G920 internal circuit board, I’m planning to do this for all the available xBox buttons on the Logitech G920 so I can replace it with a 300mm racing wheel