tl;dr — I dampened Fanatec paddle shifter dingy sound with ~1h of work and minimal tools. Sound comparison before/after the mod (one paddle done, one stock):

A little context:

If you have limited amount of space and people potentially sleeping (e.g. kids) in rooms next to where your toys are set up chances are you might be limited in amount of noise your loved ones will tolerate.

Putting on a full-size wheel rim on my Logitech G27 really helped with immersion, then upgrading to a Fanatec setup was a huge step in making my sim racing / gaming smoother and quieter experience (thanks to belt-driven FFB). However, when racing open-wheelers with paddle shifters the noise of shifting down a half dozen gears while braking in panic at the end of a straight before a hairpin was still something my family was not excited about, so my play time was quite limited. Yesterday I embarked on a quest to make an already awesome ClubSport steering wheel quieter, in particular attempting to reduce gearshift paddle noise.

My particular wheel is BMW GT2, but I think it’s fair to assume paddle spring mechanism is shared between all Fanatec wheels.

Plan

The construction of the wheel base & wheel is really sturdy, and shifters are metal — so I assumed most of the dingy noise came from metal-on-metal contact when shifter would reach limits of motion. If there was only some way to dampen that impact by placing something (fabric? plastic? rubber?) on that contact point without interfering with range of motion too much — it should get much much quieter.

Execution

Tools:

For this modification you’ll need a knife, superglue, phillips screwdriver and — last but definitely not least — t8 and t10 allen wrenches:

Parts:

Rubber band and a relatively thin cable (I used a cheap RCA cable that came with some electronic device — but you can use whatever you have, as long as it’s skinny enough).

Disassembly:

To take off the back panel, unscrew these 6 screws and it will just lift off (although it fits relatively snugly):

Sure enough, the construction around paddle shifter mount is a metal box, which houses a spring, paddle mount and a button. This is what it sounds like when shifter is used:

Taking off the actual paddles is trivial, just unscrew two torx screws on each.

Next, TEST THAT YOUR RUBBER BAND IS NOT TOO THICK.

Just work it in the top gap (closer to the wheel base) and see that pressing/depressing the paddle button still works fine.

Next, take off the top of the box. Unscrew the two screws on each side while holding down the paddle spring.

I feared the spring mechanism would also fall apart when I took the top cover off — but thanks to good germaneering that bit is enclosed and nothing flies off anywhere.

Next, cut a strip of rubber band and superglue it to the inside of that top cover. Remember, little superglue goes a long way — it smears quite well, so just a tiny drop will do fine. It should turn out something like this (although obviously I used a little too much glue):

Set it down to dry while you take care of other contact point — outside edge of the “box” mentioned above. I set it down on a stack of coins so it would have some pressure on it — but that’s probably unnecessary.

Next, cut a piece of cord the same length as the rubber band piece before:

Next, carefully cut the insulation of the cord along the length of it (we don’t care about the wire, we’re going to use the insulation) — like this:

Pull out the wiring and slide the insulation tube on the edge of the “box” . Start from one end and work it on by sliding it over. It may be a bit tricky because it fits snugly — but once it’s on, snug fit is what we want.

Next: TEST BUTTON STILL CLICKS.

You should hear a distinct click on the down press and a click on release (not unlike mouse button clicks), like this:

In my case, on one side the insulation was just barely too thick for the button to get clicked appropriately. There are two ways to fix that:

1. find a different wire with thinner insulation and use that, or

2. (if you’re lazy like me) find a way to make the “pressing” element on the paddle just a little thicker (so it would reach far enough to press the button appropriately). I folded some double-sided tape 3x and taped it with a single piece of regular tape — holds plenty strongly, and gave me just enough extra thickness to click correctly:

Reassembly time!

Put it back together the way you took it apart. It helps to press down the paddle mount with your thumb to make it easier to align the “box cover” element with screw holes. As always with pieces on which bear tension when attached — get all the screws started first, and then tighten them one at a time later.

Before attaching the back cover, it’s handy to connect the paddles and test it on the base (especially paddle button functionality) with Fanatec driver. Here’s what mine looked like after reassembly:

Result

It is indeed a lot quieter. Here is a video at half-way through the project (unless you saw it at the very beginning in tl;dr section) comparing noise, one side already dampened and another stock, and two videos from earlier on the page also side by side for easier comparison.