Showroom Redesigned DIY H Pattern and Seq. shifter

For those of you that might not know, the shifter in my profile pic was designed and built be me just over 10 years ago. Well now I have lots of other toys and refreshed my sim so I decided to refresh the shifter too. I have covered some of this in my motion sim build but thought it probably deserves its own thread.

The old one was bulky and heavy (about 3kg!) and I was never fully happy with it. Going to a motion sim, I wanted to make it lighter and more compact.

Here is the design and final product. I am happy to share any design under the Creative commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. i.e do what you will with it but no commercial use of my design or derivatives and I must be credited in any derivative works.

Here is a 3d drawing of the main components - This was mainly done for dimensions and designing the shifter plate so it does lack the main shifter shaft and rod end etc.



The base plate has 2 options - One for 6 position H pattern and the extra plate limits it to a sequential shifter. The extra U shaped part is to hold the sequential plate in place. Simply remove the U part and slide the sequential plate out of the way (down) and you are back to H pattern.

I use an external button for reverse because it's rarely used. I have not come across any 7 gear H pattern cars in sims yet...

Main parts:
Main frame 50 x 20 x 3mm Aluminium angle - Bunnings (cut using miter saw)
Uprights - 25 x 10 x 2mm Aluminium square tube - Bunnings
Bearings (6) - 14 x 8 x 4mm MF148ZZ Flanged bearing Aliexpress
Main shaft 1/2" stainless tube*
Rod end is 1/2"* (Better off getting a female version for neater finish)
Random spring to go over shaft
Some hard wearing plastic also required for the buffer and bottom collet*
25 x 25 x 50mm Square delrin block*

All other parts are 3d printed

The intention was for the frame to be welded or braised (which would look so much better) but I ended up using some mini square brackets I had laying around that I initially bought for my 3d printer.

* Recycled from my old shifter
** The plastic parts can probably also be 3d printed but YMMV, main concern would be the bit contacting the rod end, mine is Teflon.

For the electronics I am using an OSH Studio loaded STM32F1 controller running the V15 firmware (V16 seemed to have endless issues)

I have mounted the 6 micro switches over the gear slots and added a tiny bit of high density foam (think yoga mat) to the actuators with contact adhesive. This assists with positive engagement of the switches. The micro switches are very small. D2F-01L if you need dimensions.



*Missing from pics is the U part and some covers for the top of the uprights.

This just bolts to an arm I added to my sim and is extremely durable and still very light. Even with the heavy shift knob, this is only about 1kg.

I do plan to replace the 'ramps' with carbon fibre once i can be bothered with the CNC machine. So far the 3d printed ones have held up astonishingly well but i do see them failing in the future.

If there is enough interest, I may complete the 3d model properly to give a full breakdown of parts but that's several hours of work (for me at least, i'm not a guru at Fusion360).

Happy racing!