QUOTE(Tom_T @ Mar 15 2021, 02:42 PM)
Even the LHD 914 pedals are small & tightly together compared to other cars, & IIRC most all LHD VWs then were the same.
My 2 uncles were over 6'-5" (but didn't pass that along to me!
) & they had size 14 & 14 XX wide shoes - & they both had trouble getting the set of 3 to work separately with their "big boats"!
So the crazy exercises to get a working RHD pedal cluster is no surprise to me!
That wonki (no pun intended) crazy angled brake pedal/slot is a crack-up! I mean really - how many biers/ales did that designer/engineer have first!?
Vaunted German Engineering did not shine for the RHD apparently.
Tom
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that was me behind the angled slot.
were prohibited from cutting and welding the brake pedal by the approving engineer.
the way it worked back then was you hired an independent engineer who came and inspected the car as conversion work was done in stages. went into his report. the report had to be submitted to the registration authorities. it was not like a consulting design engineer arrangement, more like working with a policeman.
come to think of it the registration authority was a branch of the police force more or less.
if you look at a picture of a rhd 911 cluster, the brake pedal does a small bend off the mounting axle to the right and then has a straight arm up to the pedal pad. its not far enough right to be comfortable in a 14. what crayfords did was cut and weld in a larger offset to the right. for some reason registration authorities were very touchy on cutting and welding the brake pedal arm here. even putting in a rhd 911 pedal arm would not have got the pedal into the crayfords spot. it happened to be one of those arguments you were not going to win with the approving engineer, he put his foot down and would not budge (pun not intended). after much negotiation
it was accepted that heating bending the arm was acceptable. (he even made a big note of it in his engineering report which i still have copy of announcing its safety etc and correct placement of pedal, blah blah for operation of the brake). thus the arm itself travels across on the diagonal. it works extremely well i can assure you. it sounds strange but the pedal pad is not moving to the right, it travels straight back in an arc. but because the lever arm has been worked across on an angle it has to cut through the pedal board along that line.
its completely german.
its functional.
form follows function.
the other thing i have is a pedal board with carpet. the green crayfords car we copied either never had one, or it was lost along the way somewhere. the pedals were just sitting there with a little fold up of carpet to shield the metal pedal carrier itself. the whole idea of a slotted section of carpet seemed to have been avoided in that particular car, not sure if that was the case in it originally. not even sure if crayfords tailored cars and pedal arrangements to customers or just had a standardized approach. i guess all that history is next to impossible to uncover anymore.
believe me, having driven a bug in the usa and plenty here and having driven my 914 both lhd and rhd, the lhd versions are way more comfortable and natural by comparison.
big feet sizes and all. if you have short legs you are in real trouble
. one of the great problems in my old squareback used to be foot slipping off clutch pedal sideways.
often when you see an old one still around that pedal pad is worn out savagely on the centreline side of the car or the opposite side - pointing to the awkwardness of getting your foot square on it. i must have renewed that pad at least once every two years.
---and there is nowhere to rest your clutch foot. so you have to be be careful to not rest it on the pedal. i usually rotate my heel so i can rest the side of my foot against the bin console and keep it away from the pedal. i can still remember driving it lhd with my foot against the carpeted wheel well. natural place to rest your foot.
think the germans thought corrective leg surgery was a better functional approach to the problem of stubborn rhd countries than sorting out their footwells?
cars after the 964 just don't have the problem because they don't have the arcing organ pedal accelerator on an angle? what porsche should have done back then was have a not kept to their design of the lhd accelerator pedal on the right?
