Replaced steering wheel - with pizza dishes!

What began my journey into sim racing was the discovery of a very old gaming wheel with a serial interface at the local recycling shop. It was a Logitech Wingman wheel.

I took it home and got it working on my PC. Then the wife complained about the smell.

There was something wrong with the red rubber of the wheel. It was soft, came off under my fingernails and was very, very smelly. Initially, I got around that by wrapping the wheel with electrical tape. But you could still smell it.

I got thinking, and arrived at the following solution:

I would cut all the red rubber off the wheel and replace it with a new one, made out of two pizza dishes, a steering wheel cover, a length of garden hose, a few pieces of plastic from bottles and lots of hot glue.

I cut the two pizza dishes to remove parts of the tray that would not be needed, but leaving enough of the metal to bend around the 'spokes' of the steering wheel to secure the rim to the center of the wheel.

The two pizza dishes are then placed back to back, and the piece of garden hose is then wrapped around the rim and secured to the pizza dishes with a lot of gaffer tape. The steering wheel cover is placed on the wheel and secured with bootlaces.

The rim is then mounted on the spokes of the wheel and the spokes are made solid with a lot of hot glue, and some fencing wire.

The paddles were extended with flat pieces of plastic cut from bottles.

This is the result:


It has proven to be very solid and has taken a lot of punishment. However, with a larger diameter wheel, the force feedback is not quite as effective as before, since you have more leverage.