Logitech G920 quick release

I recently bought myself a Logitech G920 Racing wheel it’s great fun for a bit of Dirt Rally but storing it afterwards is a bit tricky because of it’s akward shape.

So I thought I’d have a go at making a quick release mechanism to allow the wheel to detach from the base unit. At least that way I’d have two slightly smaller things to find a place for rather than one massive, heavy and akwardly shaped one.

What is that and why is it so dusty?

Pulling it apart.

First things first. I took the wheel apart to have a look at how it’s all connected. I won’t go into the details here but there’s a nice video on how to dissasemble the G29 that’s the Playstation version but the proceedure is the same as for the G920.

The wheel is attached to the base through 3 large screws that pass though the wheel’s plastic hub and fix it to a tube stub that protrudes from the base.

The wheel PCB is connected electrically to the base with a 7 wire cable. The cable connects to the wheel PCB using a 2mm pitch “PH” connector that you can find on Aliexpress.

This is the Base. The cable tucks in and has plenty of room to twist and turn inside the tube

The cable from the Base snakes through the plastic Wheel hub and connects to the back of the PCB. Note: This photo was taken later on so that’s my replacement cable there, not the original one.

The back of the Wheel has a very particular shape that slots into the Base tube

Time to break out Fusion 360.

Note that this is not the first version. In fact I think this is version 36.

It took a lot of lot of careful measuring (and remeasuring) and many test prints (and more test prints) to get my parts to fit perfectly with the G920 parts.

I’m going for a two part screw together idea. The “Upper” attaches to the wheel and mimics the shape of the tube on the G920 Base. The “Lower” matches the shape of the underside of the Wheel and attaches to the Base tube. Joining them together and providing the quick-release is a large threaded ring.

Everything is designed to be printed on a basic nothing special 3d printer using normal PLA. This means leaving things a bit chunky just to be on the safe side.

• 

  Section showing the overal arrangement. Upper (green) Lower (Yellow) Ring (Pinkish) Steel pin (Light blue) DB9s in the middle The upper pink screw holds the wheel to the Upper. The lower pink screw joins the Lower to the Base stub axle.

• 

  The blue elements show where the original wheel and base parts fit

• 

  Perspective view of section showing overall arrangement

• 

  The blue elements show the positions of the original wheel and base

This arrangement does result in the wheel being 40mm further out from the base unit than the stock G920. I’m ok with that for now and isn’t noticable in use.

The Upper and Lower are joined electrically using a standard DB9 connector. I spent a lot of time investigating all sorts of fancy and random connectors including RJ45 (ethernet) , GX12 & 16 (aviation), DIN (as used in MIDI) as well as magnetic pogo pins things. But I kept coming back to DB9. They have enough pins and will fit in the space I have available plus they’re cheap, easily available and reasonably robust.

These are going to be 3d printed PLA parts so I wanted to allow a good strength safety margin by keeping things nice and chunky – especially the thread on the Upper. I have an idea to bring things back closer in by 10mm or so but that requires a printing a part that’s bigger than my printer can fit on its bed.

Time to warm up the 3d printer

These were printed on my Monoprice Mini at 0.2mm layers. The fill (gyroid) is only at 15% or so but I have set the number of walls to 4 which results in a lot of the important vertical areas being almost solid.

This is the Upper. It fits snugly to the wheel and has a large thread around it’s base.

This is the Lower. It slots into the stub-axle and has a fairly thick 5mm flange on it’s base that is clamped by the Ring to the Upper.

This is the threaded Ring. Looks nice in yellow!

Here’s a test fit of the DB9s
Lower is on the left, Clamping ring (obviously it’s the yellow thing in the middle), The Upper is on the right with 3 steel pins for registration and resisting the torsion.

Fitting it all together

I wanted to keep the original cable intact – and I didn’t want to have to open up the base of the G920 – so I made a little adaptor that the original cable plugs in to on Lower.

• 

  This a cable assembly montage

• 

  For the Lower I made a DB9 to PH 2mm adaptor

• 

  For the upper is a simple case of soldering the PH plug wires onto the DB9 – In the correct order of course!

• 

  The adaptor fits in the Lower. The original cable will plug in here.

• 

  This plug will end up on connecting to the PCB in the wheel

Here’s the Upper fitted to the wheel. It’s hard to take photos of black prints. I could have printed them in a different colour but I wanted them to match the rest of the wheel.

Here’s the Lower and the Ring attached to the base of the G920

This is the whole thing assembled

Proof it works

And now to prove that the thing actually works here is a short video demonstrating attaching and removing it. Turn on captions to see a bit of an explanation.

Wow. It feels nice to have completed a project!

Advertisement