Fitting the throttle cable and pedal

- December 5 -

Today's job was to get the throttle cable and pedal fitted. I've putting this off for some time; the throttle pedal has to end up in the right place so that I can heel and toe, but it's also got to have enough travel on it to fully actuate the throttle on the engine. I had visions of rivnuts in round tubes, and slots and all sorts of complications.

So, In the end I just decided to rivet it in a resonable looking place - if it doesn't work out I'll drill out the rivets, and try again.

As for the cable - I was surprised by just how little cable the pedal can pull, and I ended up having to mount it pretty near the top of the stalk (for want of a better word).

It took three goes to get a good smooth cable action. The first effort used some tubes bent through 90° off the original bike throttle cable. This gave a good short route, but the cable was binding inside the tube. In the next effort, I discarded the tubes, and used a longer cable run - but it was a still a bit stiff. I squirted GT85 ( a teflon containing aerosol lubricant) down the cable. and that made it worse!

So I threw the cables away, which were pretty unsophisticated ones I'd bought from Vehicle Wiring Products, and returned to my roots - I fitted a mountain bike teflon lined brake cable instead. The inner now runs as smooth as silk... I guess those Shimano boys really know their stuff.

Stop!

- December 31 -

Another little job out of the way - I spent ages trying to figure out the best way to implement a throttle pedal stop, so as not to strain the throttle mechanism on the engine should I for any reason find my right foot attempting to plant itself on the floor... In the end, I found the easiest solution was to put in an old bicycle brake cable running parallel with the throttle cable, with a brass stop on the end. I've incorporated yet another cable adjustment screw so that it'll be easy to change where the stop comes into play.

Finishing touches

- February 19 -

I added the throttle's return spring whilst looking for something better to spend my time on.

Better routing for the throttle cable

- April 7 -

The throttle cable outer has kinked where it comes out of the throttle pedal turret. It doesn't go through an extreme angle, so I must have lent on it sometime. However it happened, it seems to me that it could happen again, so I decided to fix it.

I bought from my local bike shop some V-brake pipes. These are used on mountain bikes to route brake cables from the frame into the top of one of the arms of a set of V-brakes.

The pictures show the effect - the cable action is even smoother than before, there's no risk of kinking the outer, as it exits the pipes in a straight line, and the outer is shorter too - a great solution!

moveing the pedal

- November 20 -

Not much to report here. I moved the throttle pedal forwards (away from my foot) by about 1.5". I had to cut a bit off the bottom of it to stop it hitting the back of the pedal box, but looking at the marks on the pedal, I wasn't using that bit of the pedal anyway.

This page last updated on: Sunday, Jul 16 2006