When crafting a vehicle it’s easy to think that pedals will kind of be easy. it turns out that your feet want the pedals to be at about the same lift from the floor and they want the angles to be “sensible”. The last thing you want is to miss the brake pedal when you are in a hurry to find it!
Here’s some flower songs to go with petals….er…yeah
A kiss from a rose — Seal
Bed of Roses — Bon Jovi
Marigold — Nirvana
It ain’t all flowers — Sturgill Simpson
The buggy was relatively easy because there really wasn’t much space to start with so whatever I could do was the best it could be. For the Gladiator, we’ll see how it works out.
Here’s where we started… oof.
The gas pedal also wasn’t really attached, it was more kind of screwed to the floor.
For the ebrake I can use the original. Not much to change/do there at the moment. However… adapting the brake pedal and the drive-by-wire-throttle… that’s a different story.
First I found a good spot to mount the brake pedal inside that reused some of the space for the original brake master cylinder. Of course I’m using the more modern donor truck’s hydraulic booster and brake master cylinder. Here you can see those mounted to the firewall.
I also spent some time marking on the firewall where the controls will go through and starting to plug holes I won’t be using. Here is where the brake pedal landed. it’s pretty good out of the box!
Backing up a bit it looks pretty good I think with the ebrake position:
That leaves drive-by-wire-throttle, which will be more of a challenge. If I positioned it like the donor it would go somewhere like here:
That’s no good. The non-tilt steering borked that up. If I “just move it over, the pedal is going to be in the center of the vehicle…
Ignoring where the pedal is landing, let’s just find a spot for it to mount…
There was a spot just uphill of here that wasn’t terrible and it had a bolt in “just about the right spot…”
Well, if I disassemble the throttle pedal and reassemble, can I make it work?
Looking at the pedal above, can I recreate that on the original pedal? I like the original pedal as it is pretty classy!
The back is steel! I think I can recreate the “new” pedal’s structure on the bottom of the old Gladiator pedal.
I think the hardest part will be NOT melting the rubber.
I cut off the last bit that interacts with the spring and cut out some steel in the shape of the support, then drilled a few holes and tacked it on the back of the jeep pedal.
Next I mounted the base up onto the firewall using a bolt hole that was already there.
The astute may have noticed I cut the s-curve out of the pedal link and flipped it over the other way. What you might not can see is that I cut a wedge out of the big end to get a better angle.
I spent quite a bit of time fiddling with this. Here is kind of what I’m after… sort of.
You want the pedals roughly aligned with each other and oriented to where the “throw” for the pedals are in basically the same direction.
Here is a similar shot but with the final piece of the lever arm at it’s fully extended position. Looks not horrible, but it’s a little too far in.
At full throttle the clearance appears good. I think if I add just a wee bit of angle iron it’ll work!
I am not planning to attach the pedal to the floor as it was before. I may end up trimming the bottom of the pedal. Here it is after tacking in the top of the angle iron. It has the spring in so it’s at the far extreme angle for the pedal. I can adjust that angle by adding just a hair or two of material on the end of the lever arm.
Looks good at full throttle! none of the arm/structure is hitting the floor. I will have carpet/etc so I think it’s good.
Pulled out, welded, primed and painted… now stored until it’s time to fully assemble!
Pedal to the metal!
wrenchingseason 