I'm sure they are not that cheap to just give away

I'm guessing they are just honoring my word and hope I send them back

 

Heh, if it's coming from/to china... It's cheap enough to just give away.

 

<p><br />Yeah for real though, it probably only cost them $12 for actual parts. The amount of time and effort to ship internationally sounds like it's more money than it's worth. I mean.. think how much time it's going to take to actually get the parts back, evaluate the parts, sort the parts, re-stock the parts, list the parts as &quot;open box&quot; and re-ship the parts...</p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>Seems like profit is low for them to ask for it back, especially all the way from China!</p>

 

$55 might be way. kk said they were aluminum so that means machineing then some polish last anodized. its not pvc made from a 500 3d printer just saying

 

<p>Machining? More like forming/extrusion and punching. Much better for small part/high volume production. Especially aluminum. Anyways.. doesn't even matter haha they still asked for it back. Look forward to seeing the new ones.</p>

 

arriving tomorrow

 

 

<p>not a huge fan</p><p>need that steering wheel though....</p>

 

I've made a printed peice which fits around the paddle. It looks really stupid though so i gotta try to make it look a little better..

 

icrap, if you make yours one thing I noticed is the + paddle one our cars has grooved lines behind the paddle so you can differentiate between the + and - by feel. Is it too much work to have yours the same? Not a huge deal either way.

 

^ that's easy since all i would have to do is add two lines.

 

they are kind of worthless, you can't blip the tips and get it to shift,
you have to pull it from the back where those cutouts are

 

<p>Just curious, not tryna be a jerk lol. Why would one want to differentiate between the + and - by feel? We know the right one is upshift and left one is downshift. </p>

 

Hmmmmmmmmmm. I'm on the fence about these.

 

<p></p><p>&nbsp;</p><p>They are connected to wheel, so when the wheel turns so do the paddles, so you can feel which is +/- even if the wheel is upside-down</p>

 

<p>Good point, I forgotten about that. But even still, when cornering and wanting to shift, isn't it already intuitive to already know at that point in time which paddle is which? I never thought to myself, &quot;shit, is the paddle at 9 o'clock up or down?!&quot;</p>

 

Like Joe said when turning I find it helpful so you don't have to think about which one is which since the positions have reversed.

 

<p>IMO it takes longer to &quot;feel out&quot; the + vs the -. For me I just know which one is which based on how much I've turned. For me anyway, I find the +/- to really just be cosmetic detail. But if it helps you identify which button shifts up/down then it definitely sounds useful for some.</p>

 

yeah i dunno i've never had a problem with which is which, but anyways its a simple 2 second thing of extruding a line if i want to add them to the extensions lol

 

I printed in in fugly blue so i don't waste the black, but the final one will be black....



still wanna adjust the shape. maybe ill make it pointy or something lol\

ignore the top bit not fitting the paddle correctly, i already fixed that in rev 2

 

Some unsolicited comments:

One of the first things I thought about when I saw this originally is that the way it attaches just seems cheap to me. If I were making these, I'd do one of two things; either make a little pocket at the top so that the tip of the top paddle would slip in, say up to or right past the little "-" sign in your picture above. That way you wouldn't need the little set screw at the top like the China design. Then, at the bottom, have a little cover type cap that either clicks in place over the bottom shifter tip and has a retaining screw, or the whole bottom cover is flange screwed in place.

The other possibility would be to have a piece like you have that goes on the back of the stock paddle and then have another piece that covers the entire front of the paddle. Probably flange screwed together from the back (or vice versa) so that all you see from the driver's seat is a clean piece, not the abrupt "snap-on" look of the current design.

Don't know if you care or if that even makes sense but I think that could go a long way to improving the look of these.

 

Well i couple of other ideas i had were

- replace the entire paddle with a new peice... but i couldn't figure out how to easily get the original out without having to take apart the whole wheel, which i really don't want to do

- Have it clip over top and cover the original paddle.. this should be possible but its gonna be really hard to get it right

^ i think that's what your talking about, right?

 

Pretty much. Basically, anything to get away from just using those two setscrews to hold it in place. There's got to be a more eloquent design than that; I mean, it works, but there's got to be better.

The more I think about it, from an aesthetics point of view, I think having the big piece (like you designed, and the current design) attach to the front side would look best. Then just have a smaller rear piece sandwich the OEM paddle in place.

Whatever approach, I think you'd want a firm, positive attachment feature and not just rely on a snap clip friction fit. I'd design in a minimum of two screws, trying for four (two top, two bottom) to hold it all together.

If you get the tolerances right, you should be able to include a small "-" and "+" cutout (or just a circle would work) over the illuminated portion of the OEM paddles.

 

GhettoCAD as follows:

 

just an fyi, those set screws chew up the paddles so be warned.

 

That was the #1 thing I thought was wrong with the design. It made me cringe when I saw the initial picture with the setscrew run up to the paddle. There must be a better way that doesn't cause damage to the OEM pieces. That's why I like the sandwich idea, there shouldn't be any damage that way.

 

ya im gonna do what cu2wagon suggested. no set screws.