Initial D project part 3

The last thing to do is to hack in the 360 wheel. To do that you need to dismantle it.

First remove these allen bolts and lift off the face plate


Then undo a load of T8 security torx screws on this base and to remove the bottom part of the white case below

That'll reveal the gubbins



You need to disconnect this lead which runs to the buttons in the wheel


Then remove these allen bolts which will allow you to reove the wheel entirely

Like so


I bought this daytona dash to use. It avoids hacking up the ID one to allow the conversion to be undone in future if I want.




I then fabricated a board that attached to the rear of the dash and screwed this to it. I trimmed the case down a bit but kept it there as it was useful for the pcb mounting etc. I'll put up meausrements for the board when I remember. I put a lot of screws through that grey section in the pic above into the wooden board. The central axle sits like this. Notice I had to trim the central plastic section the steering axle runs through. I also had to file the metal mounting plate to expand the axle hole from from 40mm to 50mm.


I then cut back the wheel shaft's cover to make up for the space lost due to the mounting board etc



And that was about that!

The wheel sits pretty close to the dash at the moment. I really need a longer version of the white wheel axle thingy to allow it to sit 4 or 5 cm closer to the driver. I have a friend who'll hopefully make me one some time soonish. The cab will need to be out of action while that's happening though so I decided to play it for a month or so before I go for that. It's playable now if not ideal.

Here's a little vid of a friend giving it a whirl.



As for other things I may possibly do:
Add the missing buttons in the dash and wire them up to something. Currently only the start button is populated, that's the degauss
replace 4 way shifter with an up / down and wire it up. Currently the shifter is just for show. I use the paddles mounted on the wheel
swap monitor, either for another 31k CRT with no burn (this has ID burn and isn't amazing in terms of geometry etc) or possibly or an LCD. The Sega framed LCD upgrade is unfortunately out of my price range at the minute.

Initial D project part 2

Next job was to sort the pedals. I took apart the microsoft pedals and had a look at the potentiometers.




Metering them across the points highlighted up there showed the are 5k ohm. That was great news since that's the same value as in sega pedals like the new old stock initial D ones I picked up last week. The microsoft ones only move through around 10 degrees, a lot smaller rotation than the sega ones but the value changes are the same.

Here are the pots in the ID pedals.



They terminate in 3 pin AMP connectors. I stripped those off along with the jack on the end of the microsoft pedal leads and (after spending a fair bit of time checking the wiring) connected up the microsoft wiring to the sega pedals with a terminal block. I took a closeup so you can see what goes where.




At some point I may swap these over to AMPs or another neat solution but it'll do for the moment.

The great news is that it works perfectly! I was pretty excited when it just worked since I'd kind of expected more of a struggle to get it sorted. They work 100% fine. a full range of values across the full play on both pedals i.e. reading of zero when not depressed, reading of 100 when fully depressed and 50 reading in the middle. These are a massive improvement over the microsoft ones.

Initial D project part 1

First, build the shell....

I got this cab in pieces. The first step is to pop the shell back together.

Start with the main base section


Add the pcb mounting boards. Empty in this case apart from the transformer and little power distribution board.

The pedal mounting box thingy goes on next. Four bolts.

Then the lower monitor frame. More bolts either side.


Side panels next.

And then the top monitor mounting bracket.

The monitor goes in next. There's a 29e31s in this one at the moment

On with top monitor cover and the topper box. I had to remove the front section (just a couple of security torx screws) to insert some of the bolts and wire it up

You can also pop on the rear monitor cover at his point once you've hooked up the monitor power and VGA and fiddled with any pots you need to on the chassis.

The seat also came in a lot of bits. his small base section goes on with a few bolts

Followed by the larger piece which bolts to the main body of the cab.

In the shots below the main body of the cab is all assembled. I've also popped the pedals in place (more on them later), inserted a 5.1 audio amp (big silver box in the base) and attached some speakers to it. There are the two original speakers flanking the monitor, a central one which you can see in the behind CP space, a large active woofer under the seat (decased) and two speakers in the gull wings. ID didn't come with gullwing speakers despite having the cases for them so I fitted a couple I had lying around. They're a lot smaller than the stock ones but do the job.