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      05-31-2017, 04:12 PM   #46
StephGOD
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WhatsADSM View Post
For all intents and purposes I would say the design is final. I think this is the 10th revision or so. I played with various parameters to get them to fit *just* so. If you take a look at your steering wheel you will find that there actually isn't a ton of room between the wheel and the stalks (namely the lane change stalk and the the wiper stalk). You need to balance the ability to easily get to the paddle without being so close that the back of your fingers are always on it, and being so far away that you can't easily get to the stalks.

As for durability they are FAR stronger than the stock piece. They are a few times thicker than the stock part (my bracket on the left, stock on the right):

For fun I actually put one end of the bracket on the ground and the other on a 1" piece of wood and stood on it. Didn't budge. So I am confident in saying if you do something crazy with the paddles you won't break my part but likely one of the other stock plastic brackets which hold it to the wheel. BTW it appears the weakest link in the whole assembly would actually be to PUSH against the paddle (opposite of what you should be doing) as hard as you can. That will stress the two little tabs on the one of the stock plastic parts that are fairly small. So I don't ever recommend trying that, aftermarket paddles or stock.

The only thing left really is to dial in the final material which will almost certainly be polycarbonate.

If someone wants to test drive them and give me their opinion I'm certainly cool with that. Always nice to have a second opinion, and my car is down at the moment for a bunch of other track prep work anyways.

First of all I think what you did here is totally awesome!! Great overall ingenuity and things like this are what make Bimmerpost the best car forum on the interwebz

With all that being said I do have a couple concerns on the design however and just wanted to point them out before you start mass producing these.

1. The little plastic part circled below is the custom portion of the plastic base that is used to screw into the E9X paddles correct? If so, do you believe this piece is strong & robust enough to hold up to thousands of shifts overtime? Reason I believe this part might be the weak link of the design is because if you look at how the F8X paddles attach to the base you can see that there's a flat metal piece that extends from the paddle and this piece slides into the plastic base and screws in about 3/4" of the way down effectively strengthening the thin plastic OEM base.

2. The angle at which the E9X paddles mount to the custom plastic base seems much greater in comparison to the stock OEM LCI paddles. How exactly did you calculate this angle? Just from the few photos you've post it looks like if you mounted everything up including the OEM plastic boot adapter piece that attaches over the electronics then the face of the E9X paddles wouldn't be parallel to the steering wheel. Would you be able to take a sideview photo of the paddles mounted up to the steering wheel?

3. This is just a thought but I believe if people have upgraded to an actual E9X M3 steering wheel the whole assembly might not physically mount up correctly. The reason I bring this up is because when I did my retrofit the E9X paddle assembly didn't mount seamlessly to the back of my OEM M-Sport steering wheel (i.e. there's a bit of a gap). This makes me think that the OEM plastic adapter boot piece would not work with an actual E9X M3 steering wheel. Could be totally wrong here though lol. Does anyone have any experience with this?
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