Ok. for some reason I`ve managed to hit 999 posts, no idea how, so I thought I`d try and make the big 1000 useful to someone.

I recently redecorated in one room and realised there just wasn`t enough room left for a daily stroking of my G25. This obviously made me a bit sad (understatement). When I had some spare time, I thought I`d try to organise a little mini-cockpit that would fit in the available space under the main worktop and between 2 drawer units. The main requirements were - Keeping available cockpit space to a minimum and having a rock solid mounting for the moving parts.

The project is now almost finished. I have the wheel up and running again. I just have to add a few little bits when I can be bothered (the important bits are done).

Ignore the mess. The assembly room is a shithole atm.

I`ll keep this as small as possible, using thumbnails, rather than hosted pics, so anyone on lower bandwidth that might want some ideas, can choose to click if they wish.

Pics in order -

01/02 - A limited space. The bane of many a simracer. Real life getting in the way of fun. Not good for driving pleasure. Note the subwoofer in the space between units. There is a plan for that....

03 - Some scrap wood and MDF starting to be cut to shape to fit the space. Nothing fancy. Nothing expensive. The MDF scraps were free from a local training centre when they were moving to smaller premises. The thicker wood used for mounting the hardware was cut from an old inch thick unused pine kitchen table that I`d had lying in storage for ages.

04 - A basic cabinet taking shape. Less than a centimeter clearance around the sides, and about 8mm taller than the height from carpet to underside of the worktop, so it would compress the carpet and grip without having to screw down into the floor (I`d like to be able to easily pull it in and out at will to clean or work in there if I need to). All joints were both screwed & glued for maximum strength/stability under use.

05 - Pedal mounting board added on top of a footplate. I really wanted the pedals mounted upside down from the default positions, and also custom spaced. I figured the MDF base alone would bend or flex under the constant pressure of huge hobbit feet so I dumped a layer of pine on the bottom for strength and stability. This pic shows the removeable dustguard I made to cover the pedals and the footplate is shaped to fit around the sub.

06 - The footplate/pedal mounting area without the dustguard. Added a dead pedal on the left side to avoid the evil clutch foot cramps in longer racing stints. Started painting finished areas with thick hardwearing MDF gloss.

07/08 - Added the mountings for the wheel unit and shifter. The big hole drilled through the wheel mounting base was in case i needed to screw the top of the cockpit into the underside of the worktop if it shifted around under use. Holes are also drilled for the mounting screws under the wheel and shifter. More paint added on finished areas.

09 - Wheel, shifter and pedals mounted. Strong carpeting added to front of cockpit for grip (spotted some stupidly cheap bargain doormats in the local supermarket while shopping. Found a dark grey one. £0.99p). Clipped cabling from pedals and shifter up the inner skeleton of the cockpit up to wheel unit. Added some extra screwing mounts on the top part for a front panel.

10/11 - Cockpit shifted through to where it lives. Shoved hard under the worktop. It is very secure under there, and doesn`t move at all no matter how hard you turn the wheel or accidentally bump the shifter mount while pissed. Front panel cut to fit around wheel unit to minimise dust, and provide some area to mount more buttons on later. The sub is sitting snugly in it`s little area. Since it is now sitting on the base of the cockpit, it acts like a buttkicker. Engines, wind noise, road noise, etc are now pushed through the whole cockpit, very strongly vibrating the pedals, shifter and wheel to add to the simracing fun.

All in all, I`m having way more fun that I had before when the wheel and shifter were just mounted at the same level on my old desktop. The immersion level has gone waaaaay up and I have more room to move around in than before, as well as being a lot more comfortable in longer driving sessions.

Hopefully, someone might get some ideas from this and get creative in enhancing their own simracing experience. If not, then meh. I tried my best

Random question - Why do you never use a "standard '?

You always use `, as a pose to ' - which means "I've" becomes "I`ve".

Again sorry for being utterly random...

um... no idea. I`ve always used that little bugger at the top left. It just seems more natural. At least my grammar and spelling are usually good unless the evil typos creep in somewhere.

Random is fine. It took me about an hour to post the 1st post due to heat. I suppose you just get pedantic when you`re hot :P

That's really neat, great job

Nice little unit.

I had a little bit more space so I built a simple A-frame table thing that can slide under my desk if I really need to get it out of the way.

Looks great, really neat. What do you use for a chair? Post a pic with your chair in position.

also see http://www.thewayiplay.com They will appreciate this over there to.

The chair is only my regular comfy locking swivel/tilt office chair, so nothing exciting, I`m afraid.

The whole point was having a proper positioned mount for the pedals, shifter and wheel, and and not taking up much more space than I already had without the wheel, etc mounted, so I wanted to keep my regular chair and not build a full cockpit with built-in racing seat.

If the office chair had moved under any sort of load while driving, I`d probably have built some sort of mechanism from the base of the unit to catch the front wheels, but it stays still while in the locked position. I guess the carpet still has some life left in it

Future plans for this thing will most likely involve adding a super cheap Logitech Precision gamepad (torn apart and mounted inside, with the buttons wired to proper chunky ones on the removable front panel), and some tasteful 60`s/70`s marque logos added to the panel, missing shifter top, and replacing the logitech logo in the centre of the wheel, when I can find ones of the right size.

Looks fine to me.

If you ever find the chair keeps rolling backwards later on, just get a small length of rope and tether it from the desk legs to the chair wheel. Would be the simplest way and easy to remove when not in use.

Front panel buttons sounds awesome. Good luck.

It`s absolutely solid, any rearward pressure seems to get absorbed by the carpet and limited locked movement of the chair

Obviously, since it`s a crappy budget bit of office furniture, I was worried once I`d solidly mounted the hardware, the added forces would affect the seat, but It`s absolutely rigid.

Not had a good look at that site before, although I have been on it from various clicked links.

Adding panel buttons wired to another controller should be fine, although that would obviously automatically assign itself ahead of the G25 buttons, and need some adjustment. Seems to be no way around it, but that`s easy to assign in-game for me at least, since I`m not using any weird controls. I only use the profiler to specifically assign lock, centring spring, etc, between sims, which won`t affect the button shifting

I have a G25 and a PS3 clone logitech Wireless pad. The pad seems to be assigned as controller two and the G25 is registered as the first controller.

Try unplugging the Pad and then reboot with only the G25 attached. Then reconnect the pad second while PC is on. It should pick it up as controller 2. Then do a full reboot, see if the pad stays and controller #2. That worked for me on WinXP.

Goodluck.


(unless I read your post wrong and you want it the other way around...)

Tried pretty much everything atm. Under XP SP2 or 3, any combo of plugging in the G25 or Dual Action pad seems to have the pad taking preference for the lower numbered buttons, and the G25 buttons get bumped higher up the list, in LFS, GTR2, rF, RBR, etc.

It`s easy enough to work out when I finalise all the individual buttons I`ll need for each install, in each sim, and assuming the bastardised panel pad will be plugged in all the time, and the G25 plugged switched on when I want to drive. Atm though, until I get a spare pad and rip it up, temporary testing just causes all sorts of headaches