F8X M DCT Paddles (Retrofitted)

[LeMansBeauty]

I'm in as well. $100 for new paddles is a steal. Interested to see the titanium or black though.

[StephGOD]

Originally Posted by WhatsADSM

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?

[WhatsADSM]

Originally Posted by StephGOD

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.

The weakest link (of the adapter plate) is at the bottom of the paddle where it begins to connect to the adapter for the new paddle. Close to what you have circled. I scaled the part down dramatically to find the failure point. however that only considers my paddle itself. There are other plastic components in the paddle shift assembly including a pin which is dramatically smaller as well as a PCB that you would be stressing when pulling on the paddle. If PUSHING against the paddle you are stressing two small tabs in the stock housing. All of these stock parts are MUCH MUCH smaller than the cross sectional area of the failure point on my adapter. They are also likely ABS or PC-ABS versus PC.

As I stated above I have literally stepped on a bracket with one side of it supported by a piece of wood and it didn't budge. I will freely admit I am not a heavy dude, but I assure you if I supported the stock pin or PCB in and stepped on a paddle I would break something.

As for longevity. That is an interesting question. But two things:
1) The stock paddle is actually an aluminum paddle impregnated with a plastic mounting surface.
2) If I look up papers on longevity of polycarbonate (honestly even ANY plastic I suspect) we aren't even in the picture of fatigue. I am including a study done on mechanical and thermal fatigue of PC done by those much smarter than myself (I am an engineer but not a mechanical or chemical engineer). Here is an excerpt:
"The Lexan141R material was injection moulded into tensile bars according to ASTM-D638, having a gauge length of 100 mm and crosssectional area of 3x10 mm2"

That cross sectional area is smaller than the failure point we are talking about here. Using that they collected long term failure data with a certain amount of stress which results in this graph:


Mine would follow the non-annealed line (lower of the two lines).
What does this say? Well it says the failure is not measureable below lets say 40MPa or so. The stress we put on the paddle is a few orders of magnitude smaller than 40 Mpa (~5800 psi).

Even leaving in some room for margin/error this certainly agrees with what I am seeing with physically standing on the part. Most importantly it shows that if you stay within reasonable limits of the part it simply doesn't fail due to applied stress.

https://pure.tue.nl/ws/files/1927251...3620967040.pdf

Originally Posted by StephGOD

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?

You are correct I did measure the stock F8x M3 paddle angle. That is what I started with. After quite a few iterations of the design I ended with an angle slightly more than the stock paddle... But only by a few degrees. You need this additional angle otherwise the paddle is too close to the wheel and will nearly rest on the back of your fingers when you place them on the wheel. Again we are talking about a few degrees here, just enough to offset it a few mm out at edge of the paddle.

Originally Posted by StephGOD

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?

Now this is probably the best question yet... All I know is the physical mounting surface (against the wheel) is the same between the two steering wheels. I am not sure where that physical mounting plate exists in coordinate space relative to the M-Sport wheel.

Interestingly enough I actually will be replacing my steering wheel with an E9x steering wheel since mine is a little chewed up and I found an M3 replacement for a reasonable cost. So this is something I could actually test out... and probably should considering I will be using these .

It may simply fit right up. If its a small tweak then I could offer two different types. If they are dramatically different then I agree it is possible that the adapter wouldn't work at all.

[WhatsADSM]

Also found a picture (courtesy of ESS) of the internals of the E9x M3 paddle (which I have also taken apart before). You can see the size of the plastic parts here that BMW deems acceptable for lifetime stress. There is a large arm there with a cross sectional area considerably smaller than the cross sectional area of what I am using here.

[WhatsADSM]

Here are the requested side view pictures. Also shown are my hands holding the wheel and the stalks fully depressed.




facebook image uploader

[Orangee94]

Originally Posted by WhatsADSM

Here are the requested side view pictures. Also shown are my hands holding the wheel and the stalks fully depressed.

looks good !!

[519.E82]

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone know if this works on the older steptronic paddles?

[BimmerAg]

Originally Posted by 519.E82

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but does anyone know if this works on the older steptronic paddles?

These guys sell some that work with steptronic (remove the spaces from the URL)
https://www.nelson racing wheel.com/paddle-shifters

[shepty]

Hello. Just reading through the thread, but wanted to double check. So will these paddles fit an 2008 135i , without any mods? Thank you !

[Yeineken]

Originally Posted by shepty

Hello. Just reading through the thread, but wanted to double check. So will these paddles fit an 2008 135i , without any mods? Thank you !

I don't think so. These will fit DCT transmission no problem.

[wrxified]

So to bring this back again. I have a 2011 135i with DCT. Would I would need the e9x m style or f20 paddles? And we’d need to fabricate a bracket like yours. I’d like to buy these if available.

Sorry I’m reading the testing part you did and can’t determine which paddles you ended up with in the end. How do we get this 3D printed part.

[acoustix]

Originally Posted by wrxified

So to bring this back again. I have a 2011 135i with DCT. Would I would need the e9x m style or f20 paddles? And we'd need to fabricate a bracket like yours. I'd like to buy these if available.

Sorry I'm reading the testing part you did and can't determine which paddles you ended up with in the end. How do we get this 3D printed part.

You can use f series paddles. The bases are the same, however you need to change the circuit board out from your old duct paddles. Here is a picture

[zx10guy]

Or follow the suggestion to go with the Nelson Racing Wheel paddle kit like I did:

https://www.1addicts.com/forums/show...n+racing+wheel

[BAN_M2C]

Originally Posted by zx10guy

Or follow the suggestion to go with the Nelson Racing Wheel paddle kit like I did:

https://www.1addicts.com/forums/show...n+racing+wheel

+1 on the adapters from NRW.. perfect fit

[wrxified]

Originally Posted by BAN_M2

+1 on the adapters from NRW.. perfect fit

Nice BAN_M2!!!

Which paddle is that?

[BAN_M2C]

Originally Posted by wrxified

Nice BAN_M2!!!

Which paddle is that?

Thanks, they are from European Auto Source, pinged then thru the M3 forums since they are from an E92.

[6ixSpd]

Nice write up! Curious though, are the F8X ones illuminated or is that just the photo?