The start of my roll cage/tube frame. The
tube is 1.5 .095 wall DOM. I used a Hossfeld bender at my work to bend it,
that was a pain in the ass, probably because I've never worked with tube.
working with tube is slooooow
The coilovers are going to mount to the
horizontal tube. I still got a lot of tube to fit.
That is a Z31 (early 300zx) R200 diff with 260z stub shafts in it.
Had to make way for the cage. The square tube
is so the body does not collapse.
Almost done with rear suspension, I still
have to run tube to the back for bumper, fender brackets and to the diff. The fuel cell
is going to mount under the X of tubing and over the diff.
I almost welded my self into the cage
Here is the start of the body mounts, I
making it just to hold up the rear part of the body. Its not meant to be
another structural part of the chassis.
Up untill now I had only tack welded the tubes.
There is no way to fully weld them in place. After I had fitted all the
tubes for the back I had to remove almost all of the tubes because they
overlap.
This is one reason why I cut the back of car
out.
The only thing holding up the back of the car is those 2 pieces
of box tubing welded to the bottom of the wheel well. I was worried
that the car would collapse .
Moving the cage back made it easy to finish
welding
Had to have a picture of me tig welding
One thing I learned; Its easier to block up
the car to ride height, then build the suspension to hold the car at the
level. Its VERY hard to build a car up in the air and get proper suspension
travel at your predetermined ride height
Opps, my cutting torch slipped. The picture is
smoky because I caught a rubber bushing on fire
From the very beginning of this project on thing has bugged me. How to
rigidly mount the steering rack so it has good suspension geometry and
will clear the front sump of the SR20. After making or modifying 4
cross members, I decided the only way to do it was to replace the front end
1st I drew up plans in a CAD program to check
clearance and geometry. Drawing it up made it a lot easier and faster to
build because I cut up all the material at on time on a horizontal band saw
to the predetermined length and angle
I made simple fixture so I could make both
sides of the frame rails the same. It's just a square that the frame rail was
clamped too.
the nice thing about having plans to go off of, is every thing
is a perfect fit as you can see in the fitment of the frame rails