SCrazy Winter Projects

I've promised pics so here we go......

First pic shows the bottom of the A-pillar bar on the driver side. I tied the dash bar into the A-pillar on the car for a couple of reasons: first because the ~~~ kit from S&W had the wrong angle bend on the A-pillar bar, keeping the top of the A-pillar bar parallel to the windshield the bottom of the bar would not have extended down to the floor but would have gone up on the fire wall (you can see that in the second pic) so I changed the angle of the A-pillar bar at the dash bar so I would drop straight down to the floor. This also further braced the chassis which seemed like a good thing.

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These next shots show how the A-pillar bar follows the windshield up to the halo bar from the inside, the tube gusset between the A-pillar bar and halo plus a view of the a-pillar bar through the windshield.

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Finally this is a shot over my left shoulder showing the relationship of my helmet to the halo bar that I was talking about before. You can see it's less than 2" from the bar, with padding it's going to be all but touching but it seems to be OK.

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Wow ! How in the world are you going to get the dash back in the car with all those tubes in the way ?

David

Major dashboard surgery for sure. Luckily my dash is totally gutted but the steel dashboard framework will still need to be heavily modified. To get the dash to fit around the A-pillar bars I will need to make a couple of big slots in the top, not sure yet how to make those look good and not crack the vinyl that I'm certain is brittle.

I was able to dodge the big things like steering column and pedals the rest of the stuff is much easier to modify.
 
Makes you think those guys that cut the roof off first so they have room to work are onto something...
 
Makes you think those guys that cut the roof off first so they have room to work are onto something...

I have not yet made the welds between the halo bar the and main hoop. Even with the nice open moonroof those welds are going to be a real challenge!!!

I plan on putting in tube gussets so if I cant make a complete weld I will be fine but it's going to be a challenge for sure.
 
Made some more progress this weekend...add the sill and door bars.

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Now I'm just waiting for the NHRA chassis inspector to comment on the pictures I've sent him then I will make the final attachments at the floor plate and the welds at the main hoop.

So far so good........I think
 
I heard back from the NHRA chassis inspector....mostly good news but he told me that the door bars need to mounted to the A-pillar bar within 3 pipe diameters of the floor and that the rocker bars need to be down at or below that level.

There is no way in hell I can mount the rocker bar that low and make a full weld around it at the main hoop. These bars are optional and I was only including them because I'm installing fiberglass doors and was thinking I wanted a little more side impact protection. Time to get out the cutoff wheel....those puppies are going in the trash.

It's not a big deal to rework the door bar but nowhere in the rule book does it say anything about them needing to be mounted within 3 pipe diameters of the floor....good thing I talked to this guy I guess.

He made no comments about my crappy welds though so I'm happy with that I guess.
 
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After 4 months of working on the darn roll cage I took it to be inspected and certified. I'm glad that I had sent the inspector a bunch of pictures as I was working on the installation because the inspection was a breeze and the cage passed with no issues. He checked all of the tube diameters, wall thicknesses, floor plates and gussets but surprisingly never looked closely at any of the welds, which was actually a little disappointing after all the work that went into getting those welds as perfect as possible.

This is what it was all about I guess, the cage needs to be recertified every three years.
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I thought I had previously posted some of the structural modifications that I need to make to the dashboard in order to fit it around the cage but I guess not.....so here we go.

These first two pictures show the steel structure on the back side of my dashboard, I've really gutted my dash so there is no HVAC or airbags and a ton of the wiring has been removed.

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DS Dash Before.jpg

I needed to remove a ton of structure at each end to allow for the vertical A-pillar bars to pass down through the dash, I also needed to remove a little bit of structure to allow clearance for the horizontal dash bar but with some careful planning I didn't really need to do to much to make that fit. I chopped out so much of the structure that I needed to weld back in some braces to keep everything stable.

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DS Dash After.jpg

The pictures are somewhat unclear due to all the crap in the background......a photographer I am not!!
 
Nice. I would call this a fruitful winter and a successful project. And a job well done!

Really looking forward to seeing it at some point this spring, after you have had a chance to do a little painting and install a little foam.
 
WOW looking good! lot more work then most knows. I don't even want to deal with the cage for 11.50's could not even imagine the head aches you got LOL.
 
WOW looking good! lot more work then most knows. I don't even want to deal with the cage for 11.50's could not even imagine the head aches you got LOL.

The project was FAR more intense than I imagined. Some of it was having to remove and modify the dashboard but a lot of it was having to do the fab work on the tubes in my garage. I have a lot of tools but do not have a tubing bender so even though I bought a "kit" it did not even begin to fit right so I burned a ton of time first trying to get the kit to fit and then working with a local chassis shop to make some bends for me so that things worked properly. I purchased a tubing notcher which worked pretty well if you were making notches perpendicular to the tube or at standard angle but often time the bars need to land on the radius of other tubes and the notcher didn't do a great job on those joints. Lots of time fitting joints with a grinder.

Being in communication with the NHRA chassis inspector turned out to be a good thing in the end but during install it was a pain in the azz because I would send him pictures and he would often have me change things those iterations of communication always took a few days so it really slowed things down.

Installing the cage was fortunately not an expensive project the "kit" was a few hundred bucks, I actually think I have more $$ in welding supplies than I do in actual materials for the cage.

I have 4 months of time working pretty much every weekend on this project. I think the rear end project last winter was simpler than this was, at least that project was straight forward to me.
 
Hey Brian,

Any pics of the finished cage? Specifically how the dash ended up fitting around the windshield bars and how you finished the slots in the top of the dash. Going to get started on mine this weekend and your pictures will certainly help a ton.
 
I must have purged a lot of those old pics....if I remember tonight I'll take a few of how the bars interface with the dash....it's not super pretty.
 
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