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Ideas for a Steering Wheel
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Fozzy The Bear:
The stresses involved here are HUGE! Trust me I maintain a lot of real arcade driving cabs. Attaching a large hoizontal wheel directly to the turbotwist in any way at all would be a very bad idea.

However! the way you should do it is to build your steering wheel shaft separately and with a set of heavy bearings... Then only attach the turbo twist to the end of that well supported and well fixed shaft.

You could use a piece of garden hose to connect between the steering shaft and the turbo twist to take the shock loading. This is in fact how the position sensing pots and steering pots on the Gaelco motion platform games (ATV Track, Tokyo Cop etc etc) are connected to the huge motion motor and gearbox assemblies.

Hope that helps...

Best Regards,
Julian (Fozzy The Bear)
zelony:
Fozzy,

I like the idea of a seperate shaft and a linkage.  I may go that route.  There is a ton of room under the Control Panel.

pcates,

I don't want a third arcade cabinet.  My daughter has a 4 player Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom and I have my showcase cabinet.

I am planning for the showcase cabinet to be a multiuse platform.  I am replacing the 36" viewable arcade monitor with a decased 36" Gateway Destination SVGA monitor.  That way I can hook up the Xbox, Playstation 2 and my MAME PC easily as well as watch DVD's and Television via my All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro.

I am converting my daughter's cabinet as well, using a JPAC and IPAC2.  No other mod's though.

Thanks again for everyone's advice.
Extreme8:
I've often thought about connecting a wheel to a spinner using one of those flexible cable deals similar to the extensions used on Dremmel tools or a mechanical speedometer.
Seems that it would provide a great deal of flexibility when determining where to place your controls and would isolate the spinner from the majority of the horizontal strain forces.
I haven't built one yet so I could be completely wrong but I don't see why it wouldn't work.
zelony:
Hi all,

The other day while messing around with the computer that is going in my MAME cabinet, I got an idea on how to make a quick connect mechanism for my steering wheels.

I was sitting there waiting for the PC and I was looking at some of my tools on the floor.  There was a socket extender and 1/4" adapter sitting there.  So I picked it up and pulled them apart. Bingo!  If I can modify these to work with a steering wheel and a set of bearings, I should just have to line it up and press.  Then pull to release.

I will let everyone know if it works or not.  Just thought I would throw the idea out there if anyone else wanted to give it a try.

Jeff
leapinlew:
I built a mousehack for my old driving game, but I remember thinking if I were to do it all over again I'd use a standard spinner connected to my wheel using a flexible shaft like the kind you see on drill bits. Would this work?

The flexible shafts look like this:



I figured one end would be on the end of the steering wheel and the other end would connect to a spinner which could be mounted anywhere in the cabinet.
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