About our custom made elastomers for a progressive brake feel.
Engineering is at the heart of our product development. In summer 2021 we released our Sim Pedals Ultimate+ which feature our new progressive brake elastomers (brake rubbers). This is a Heusinkveld proprietary development.
The key benefit of these elastomers is that they provide a highly progressive brake feel which is typical of what you experience in real cars. After a soft initial feeling the resistance of the brake will sharply increase as the load on the brake is increased. On the stiffest setting this will result in a brake which turns extremely hard as you increase load, but also on softer settings there is a very clear progressive feel in the pedal.
We achieve this feeling without having to artificially restrict the expansion of the rubber using cups or an enclosed chamber, which is a method sometimes used by other brands. The highly progressive brake feel is a direct function of the developed rubber compound and shape itself.
Since brake setups of real race cars vary greatly from very soft to extremely stiff, we supply elastomers of various lengths and hardness for a total of 9 possible brake resistance settings (the specification of each rubber is marker on the rubber itself). The graph below shows all available brake force curves and their highly progressive nature.
Secondary benefit of these new brake elastomers is that they provide a slightly firmer rebound compared to the rubbers we used on the release spec.
Thirdly these rubbers further improve the durability of the product. We have used automated testing to put 1.000.000+ duty cycles in an overload situation on the prototypes without any failures. If we look at units in the field the failure rate is appr. 0,006% (practically 0). Our elastomers also don’t show extreme or sudden bulging under high loads.
Good to know: After making rubber stack changes, always make sure to recalibrate your pedals. The Heusinkveld SmartControl software has an easy-to-use calibration wizard so you’ll be back racing in no time.
If you have any further questions about our new brake rubbers or about our products, please don’t hesitate to contact our Team at info@heusinkveld.com.
Thank you,
Your HEUSINKVELD Team
