Having finished restoring the gear shifter, I moved on to the accelerator and brake assembly. It was fully working, but the pedals were worn and a little rusty, the front plate was scratched and bumpy and the paint was coming off, and the whole thing was dusty and grimy. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned for 40 odd years…
I started to disassemble the whole unit. The two pots and their brackets were absolutely caked in age old dust and grime…
After taking the pot brackets off, I took another closer up photo. You can really see the disgusting state it was in, including the spider webs…
Nearly got it fully taken apart… here is the base of the pedal bracket and the two bumpers… yuck…
The accelerator lever and gear…
…and the brake pedal and gear…
Soon I had the entire pedal assembly taken apart and ready to clean. There’s a lot of parts!
A friend of mine had an ultrasonic cleaner. I’d not used one of these before but it worked wonders on all the dirty parts. For those that don’t know, you fill it with water with a tiny amount of liquid soap in it, dunk in your dirty parts, and switch it on for 15 mins or so. It makes a heck of a high-pitched racket, but it cleans stuff amazingly well…
Back from the cleaner, all the parts are looking sparkly and ready for reassembly. Without the ultrasonic cleaner, I’d have used Autoglym with a toothbrush on each individual part. It saved me a lot of time…
The front-plate, or “lid” as Sega calls it in the manual, was pretty scratched up with the paint coming off in areas…
The front of it was even worse…
First off I sanded all the paint off and got it as flat as I can. I started with a coarse 40 grit, and moved up to about 320…
I then used Isopon P38 body filler to fill all the scratches. Once this had dried I sanded it smooth ready for priming…
First coat of high-build primer sprayed on… the high-build was good because it filled any tiny scratches that the filler missed…
After the high build primer, I sprayed a coat of grey-primer, then 2 topcoats of black satin. I did the same to the pedal bracket as that was pretty banged up too…
There were a few other parts that needed repainting too. This is the collar, I suspended it on a piece of string and spun it as I sprayed it to get a nice even finish…
I also sanded and re-sprayed the black bolts used to mount the pedal assembly to the front panel…
Moving on to the pedals themselves, this is how they came up after the ultrasonic cleaning. A lot of dirt and grime removed but still a bit of rust to get off, and loads of scratches. Looks like they were originally chrome plated…
I got a quote for re-chroming the pedals, but it was stupidly expensive, so I decided to clean them up as best I could myself, starting with the accelerator pedal. As with the gear shifter shaft, I began with 40 grit, and moved up through grits 80, 120, 240, 320 and 400. Then moved on to wet sanding with 600, 800, 1200, 1500 and 2000. Then I polished it with some Maguire’s Ultimate Compound to try to get a nice shine. Came up pretty good I think…
The same process was followed on the rest of the pedal metalwork. That’ll do nicely!
Putting it all together, and I’m very happy with the results. When this baby is back on the front of the cab, it’ll look the business…
Well that’s the pedal assembly restored. Happy with that! In the next part I tackle the dashboard, and fix up the steering mechanism. See you in Part 4.
