Master Cylinder help needed!

[LafayetteFSAE]

Hey guys,

I am a Junior, building a FSAE chassis for next season. Working on designing and modeling the chassis right now, and there is one thing that I was curious about.

Our master cylinder setup from the two previous cars we have built at Lafayette have these huge, bulky brake pedal assembly/master cylinder setup.

http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s58/bluestang2002/Formula%20Car%2007-08/DSC00151.jpg

http://i149.photobucket.com/albums/s58/bluestang2002/Formula%20Car%2007-08/DSC00150.jpg

Would you guys be able to give me some input on what other setups are common for FSAE cars? If there is a better solution(which I'm sure there are) then I will be able to cut a significant amount of space off of the front of the chassis

Thanks!

Will

[Kevin Dunn]

We make ours out of square and round tubing that slides in the front bulkhead (we use square tubing for the lower front bulkhead supports). Then lock it in with slider pins.

[rjwoods77]

Eliminate the clutch pedal by using a CVT. Someone should bve shot for not using proper control cables (morse style). Those look like mountain bike hand brake wires.

[STRETCH]

If you really wanna save space, and get your pedals close to the front of your chassis, you need to consider putting the master cylinders somewhere entirely different...

[Hector]

With pullrod suspension, there is generally enough room under the driver's legs to put brake masters in front of the pedals, since you usually have a space for dampers/rockers. With pushrod, there is usually less room and therefore harder to do since you don't leave all that extra room for dampers/rockers.

Putting the masters in front of the pedal is not entirely hard to do; in recent history its been done both ways on my team without too much difficulty.

[Whis]

Okay. Holy heavy parts. Take everything there and don't use it.

Moving on from the jerk comment...

Is your chassis really so wide that you can fit in 3 pedals or are those pedals really skinny? What is the pedal face width?

Secondly, why did you mount it with a piece of sheet aluminum? Do you really need it to be adjustable?

Use a hand lever to activate the clutch. Build it into your shifter. Most Formula cars use motors that were designed to have a hand lever activated clutch.

Make your own pedals. Your throttle pedal is massive for the forces running through it. Our pedals this year weigh .4 lbs for the brake. This is achievable with aluminum or chro-mol after heat treating, the weight to strength ratio is similar. I assume you made your own bias bar so you can adapt your pedal to that.

I would recommend looking at tiltons or wilwoods site for some smaller master cylinders that you can fit in front.

We are running welded tabs on the chassis and mounting the MCs in front of the pedals.

[vandit]

@ laffayette FSAE

replying to your question of saving space .... we had our master cylinder under the pedal assembly .... you will find some pictures floating of that idea somewhere in forum only ... the mechanical leverage was less but we saved around 7 inch of space in front of chassis....

and also like Whis said .... tiltons are real small and nice ...