How to Build DIY & Replica Sim Racing Wheels [Part 1]

[Music] what is up brian here from ballistic tech and today we are back in my kind of maker space workshop area where i'm going to be talking about two subjects that i love right now and that is sim racing and making and diy stuff and we're gonna smash them together and be talking about how to get started making your own diy sim racing gear and specifically steering wheels so i'm gonna try to walk you guys through a lot of the stuff i've learned and give you as many tips as possible so i've been kind of building this wheel for actually quite a long time um learning a lot about the different materials that you might want to use the different processes that you might want to use this is actually made from the 3d files that zach from turn racing has produced it is their turn gte uh will and it's a great file so i'm gonna be you know using this as the primary example of how i want to teach you about all the stuff i've learned so the way this wheel came about was that zach was kind of requested to produce this for a real life racing driver who drives the actual car that this replica is based off of the driver wanted to be able to have you know as close to the exact real steering wheel inside of his sim racing setup as what is in his real car and uh zach made it for him as kind of a bespoke offering and i think he sold a few more of them you might actually recognize it because it was reviewed by barry on sim racing garage he spoke very very highly of it and boutique scene went crazy about this wheel it just looks so really really cool and uh zach got a lot of requests so he's been kind enough to provide people with these 3d files you can purchase them on his website they're very reasonably priced and the thing i love about his files is that he's making them off of kind of real production wheels he gives you both the stl files as well as the step files which is another kind of unique thing so if you need to make tweaks to anything to you know use different buttons to use different grips to do anything that you want you have the original step files that you can you know make those tweaks to which is absolutely great so i'm going to walk you through a lot of the different parts and materials and considerations you're going to have to make and decisions you're going to have to make to build a wheel like this but one thing zach offers is bare bones kits that match up with the 3d file so you can get depending on the wheel either a carbon fiber front plate or aluminum front plate there'll be a slight price difference in that you can get optional molded grips as well and then he sells a lot of the paddles it's a great head start for you to be able to you know produce the wheel that you want and not have to worry about how i'm going to get this carbon fiber plate so this series of videos going to range from very very easy stuff that most people are going to be able to do into some of the more difficult aspects of it but don't get too daunted there's a lot of resources online facebook groups and one group i definitely recommend checking out is the turn racing diy will builders uh discord server the community is growing and growing every single day and there's a lot of people on there sharing their own personal builds sharing their builds of zach's files and just sharing a lot of knowledge which is great just people helping each other out teaching each other about different uh aspects of wheel building you know i discovered this secret i discovered this person who's able to cut this thing for you and all that kind of stuff so a lot of great resources there and that's one of the things i love about the diy maker scene in general especially for sim racing gear is that you can apply your specific skill set the materials you know how to work with the tools you know how to work with and you know make a wheel that suits your needs specifically in terms of you know the functionality you want the aesthetic you want maybe you want to build a wheel that's an exact replica of a real race car or maybe you want to do something that's like your own kind of custom thing you'll be able to learn a lot as well as i mentioned in groups like the the discord channel so it's a great great hobby to get into so the first subject and decision you're gonna have to make is probably gonna be what you want to make your front plate out of and based on that you'll probably end up getting things like your paddles and if there's a rear plate made out of the same material so you have different options for this you can do it yourself there's a lot of different materials that you can choose from i personally have you know tried several different things out and kind of my tastes have changed a little bit as i've gone through stuff but you've got options like doing it out of aluminum there's carbon fiber which is more expensive i've tried out 3d printing and i'll talk a little bit more about you know how viable that is we're kind of printing out a little bit of a mock-up so that you can work on the wheel as you're kind of you know getting other materials in and waiting for the services to cut whatever your other front plates might be cut out of you want to make that decision early on and it'll kind of end up guiding and dictating some of your other decisions down the road i'll talk about some different services that you can you know choose some types of aluminum material or stainless steel if you want to use to real quick shout out to sin cut send if you want to do something out of a metal like aluminum they offer laser cutting services they're super super fast they give you instant quotes the pricing is very very competitive i'll talk about them in more detail so that'll be a video and then the next video will likely be covering specifically grips now i think a lot of people kind of skimp out or skip out or don't really think about the grips they're likely going to be the next thing that you put onto the wheel depending on what type of build it is and you know depending on if you want to wrap them you will definitely want to get that done before you start putting other stuff on because it's going to be very hard to wrap grips while you have other components sticking out of it so wire grip's so important it's because they are where your hands meet the wheel it's where your hands are going to be attached to for the majority of the time you're racing you want them to be sturdy ergonomic and you want them to be comfortable so zach produces absolutely fantastic grip so if you're going to go for that bare bones kit you're going to get the benefit of having his casted polyurethane rubber grips they're going to be something like a 70a shore rating so they're going to be nice and comfortable you can choose to wrap those if you want but it'll be a really really great start other options are going to be 3d printing and then you're going to have a lot of material options and a few different methods to be able to wrap the grips if you want to i'm not an expert at wrapping i'm nowhere near as good as zach but i've produced some you know pretty decent results so i'll share some of those techniques and then hopefully some other people you know if you have an upholstery background maybe you can share some tips with me so you want to get those grips figured out get those on there get them produced and once they're on there you can kind of start moving to some of the other areas of the build so after you've gotten the grips figured out the next step is probably going to be doing some of the major components like rear enclosures uh hubs adapters uh wiring covers and button inserts and things like that and the most likely kind of solution for that is going to be 3d printing so this would be a very 3d printing heavy episode i'll go over materials that you can use printers that you might want to look into if you're looking to buy a 3d printer services that you can use there's actually different 3d printing technologies like fdm which is you know the most approachable ones but there's also sla or resin based printing and then there's services which offer things like sls which is selective laser centering which uh produce really really high quality products and the pricing is actually coming down on those so again depending on that budget that you have depending on what uh things you have access to you can scale those up up and down but i've been able to uh get some pretty good results uh with 3d printing you can produce good looking parts that are also very very strong and you know those don't have to be exactly opposed to each other but i'll try to explain as much as i can i have six 3d printers myself so i use them for a lot of different uh stuff i do some contracting work and i do have a little bit of a printing service so that might be something we can talk about if you don't have access to a 3d printer so after you get all of your stuff 3d printed and cnc'd or cut by hand and you have all the parts that you need and you're ready to get into the electronics the big decision you're going to have to make is what board you want to use and by board i mean kind of a micro controller there are things like kind of prefabs little joystick controllers that you can just plug buttons into and plug joysticks into or analog inputs and they have a usb out that'll go straight into your computer and you're done they're going to be limited in the number of things you can do there are also more high-end offerings from companies like leo bodner and derek spears dsd they have some prefab boards that offer a little bit more functionality they're more specifically aimed at sim racing applications so they're going to have more inputs also going to be a number of programmable uh micro processors that you can use arduino's being the most popular in all of making and you know even a lot of product based stuff right now but you've also got stuff like teensy boards uh esp32 boards which have wireless built in so that's a good option for steering wheels and then there are you know stm boards which have more advanced arm processors and stuff like that so you know whether or not you're a programmer is going to kind of guide whether or not you want to use kind of a prefab pre-flash board or if you like programming you can you know do a lot of that nitty-gritty stuff yourself but there are some things that can help you along with this there are little software projects like simhub and freejoy and i think mm joy which that will allow you to do some kind of parametric automatic programming of them you just tell them what you want hooked up and it will handle a lot of the programming for you so you even if you don't have the programming experience you can get tools like that and then there's a whole host of resources like the discord i already mentioned where you can get a lot of help with how to do stuff so you know you get that controller picked out and then you can move on and that's going to dictate which inputs and how many inputs you can use so you've got your microcontroller picked out and maybe even have it mounted on there and you're ready to go now you need other electronics and that's kind of what i have here um i've run the gambit and and bought and experimented with a lot of different buttons ranging from a dollar button up to 25 buttons and you have a lot of options there i'll talk about a lot of these different product offerings what different people like this is going to be going to be one of the most subjective areas people like really different feels with buttons some people don't care they just want the lowest budget stuff other people want you know to try to reproduce the what's in an actual replica wheel or in a real life car wheel as much as possible so you've got a wide spectrum up there you've got different types of buttons you've got rotary encoders rotary switches toggle uh buttons and things like that so i'll try to cover as much of that stuff some of the options i'll have links to a lot of things but again the turn racing discord server we have a resources channel where you can go there and people will have a lot of information already linked to digikey and amazon and ebay where you can go and pick those up i also talk a little bit about wiring and soldering i'm not a professional when it comes to soldering i can do more than what's adequate in order to get solid connections and that's the most important thing but it is a little bit of a science and an art form some people really like to spend a lot of time and make every single solder joint perfect clean up all the flux and all that kind of stuff but uh there's some very complicated wiring which can get involved in creating diy wheels which is called matrix wiring which allows you to get a lot more inputs into your microcontroller if it's limited and that can be a little bit difficult a little bit hard to understand so i'll talk a little bit about some of the options you have there including some breakout boards i i've really started to get into designing pcbs and at first it was very daunting but it's actually becoming more and more approachable there are services you can send out to have custom pcbs printed to the point where it's almost practical to do it for a single build now it used to be if you weren't creating a product it kind of didn't make sense to have you know an order sent out to a company because they were gonna make you buy at least five now it's getting to the point where you know getting those five boards built and even um getting them filled with parts can be as low as like 25 dollars so it's becoming much more of a viable option i won't go into huge detail about that but i'll try to give you guys some ideas and again some more resources that you can go to if that's what you want to get into so one thing i'm a little torn on is whether or not i want to make a video specific to shifters that's another kind of one of those very very i'll say subjective things people really like different characteristics out of shifters uh what's very very popular in sim racing are magnetic shifters so you've got magnets which are attracting the arm to the mount and they make a very kind of satisfying clicking sound and they feel really really good you get good tactile feeling that they've been engaged and unengaged but they can be a little loud so there's some things that people do in order to kind of dampen them i'll talk about that a little bit there are pre-made shifters that you can buy these are from zac at turn racing they're the turn shifters absolutely amazing shifters uh fabricated out of aluminum and uh i think they're anodized and they have a really really nice finish but you can also do things like 3d printing your own shifters by shifters from other place so i'll go over a lot of that the switches that go into the shifters people are also kind of a little um subjective and and have different ones that they want to pick out so i'll talk about that and yeah i think i'll end up doing a whole video just on shifters there's some things that you need to think about when you're especially 3d printing shifters orienting them in a right way to make them you know stronger and being able to last through a lot of uses so yeah we'll do a whole video on shifters maybe i'll cover a little bit about paddles in there as well so then the final thing is going to be actually doing the final assembly uh there's going to be kind of two ways a lot of people go about it they'll kind of build as they get parts and then some people like me like to have everything laid out in front of them and kind of build it you know kind of like a lego set or something like that and so i'll probably walk you through the entire process that i went through to build this wheel from start to finish and we'll do some finishing things like decals where you can get stickers how you can print your own and cut your own stickers if you want to so that'll be kind of an all-encompassing bringing everything together style video where you can see step by step and i'll cover any difficulties i might come into you know that you can't really predict um but one great thing about zach's diy files is he's built the wheels usually by the time he's made them into a diy file so he's going to have run into a lot of those problems and again we also have the uh turn racing discord channel where you can find out about a lot of the problems people run into and you don't have to resolve those problems people can say oh yeah i ran into that exact same problem here's what it did and you know it'll save you a lot of time and hopefully make you end up with a better wheel so that is it for this kind of introductory video hopefully it gave you a good idea of a lot of the different componentry and things that you're going to have to consider uh if you're getting into the hobby and want to build your own diy wheel again you can do replicas you can do somebody else's design you can design something from the ground up yourself if you guys are interested in the 3d modeling aspect of that zach has a couple videos up on how he actually did some of the 3d modeling for this wheel he also builds um some custom bespoke stuff for real race car drivers uh guys and gt series all the way up to formula one so he's done some videos covering those as well i'm not an expert at 3d design but you know i've been able to do a lot of tweaks to zach's files to make them suit what i need i'm using a logitech wheelbase right now so i needed a specific adapter and i was able to take his files and tweak them so that they were made up for my adapter but um i'm really enjoying this process it's they're my two favorite hobbies right now are making and uh doing uh sim racing stuff so being able to smash them together has been great i also like making youtube videos so i'm going to be sharing as much information as i can with you guys so that is it for this video if you made it to the whole video give me a an oh dear oh yeah oh damn it for uh dave cam since i'm wearing the dave cam shirt great youtuber for sim racing if you want to check him out i'll probably have a link in the description thank you guys for watching i really uh am happy to be sharing this project and my passion with you guys so i will see you in subsequent videos [Music] peace [Music] you

Channel: Ballistic Tech

Views: 50,009

Keywords: sim racing, iracing, assetto corsa competizione, playstation 5, xbox series x, logitech g29, fanatec, turn racing, thrustmaster, csl elite, dd1, sim racing gear, sim racing esports, mod, modding, pc modding, maker, do it yourself, sim racing setup, sim racing setup budget, simulator, sim racing setup guide, budget sim racing, diy sim racing, diy sim racing wheel, diy sim racing gear, how to build, logitech g29 upgrade, logitech g29 custom wheel, logitech g29 custom wheel adapter

Id: Bh9QOz7hY_4

Length: 17min 4sec (1024 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

oh yeah. this one’s getting saved.