Cleaned up the rest of the old roof skin and used a rust encapsulator on the inner structure. Should be able to start my cage in about a week or so. I think the cage will be pretty easy to do with no roof, lots of room there....
Another update: I am slowly liberating my hardtop roof skin from its inner structure. Without exaggeration there are 200+ welds to drill out. I will be taking care of the surface rust and painting the roof splines and the inside of the roof skin before installing it. As soon as I test fit the hardtop inner structure and the roof skin I will be installing my 10 point cage.....
More work done in the last couple days. I finally finished removing the inner structure of the roof skin and sorted out which cross members to move over to the car. I figured all that out and realized I only needed 2 pieces from the inner structure. The roof skin has been liberated! I need to clean all the surface rust off the inside of the roof skin and do a few minor repairs as well as paint it before I put it back together and weld it on the car.
I also fabricated new mounting points for my leather recaro seats. I decided to go overkill and use 1/2 inch studs welded to square tubing to anchor the drivers seat. The reason I chose to do this now is that I need to know where the seat sits to properly build the cage. The new mounts are so strong you could probably pick the car up by the drivers seat. :eek2:
Started the cage tonight. I will be doing a 10 point in mild steel and I also added the "x" brace on the back because I think it looks cool and will hopefully tighten up the chassis. The cage will have 6 points welded directly to the frame.
More work on the cage tonight. I decided to go with solid door bars instead of swing outs. Also to make it nhra legal I had to mount them at and angle that really cant possibly accommodate the stock door card so Ill have to fab up some new lower cards at some point. Looking at other g-body cages a lot of guys bent the door bars around the stock arm rest (on the door card), that just isn't possible with my wider recaro seats. I have the harness bar across the main hoop yet to do then a lot of painting and patching of the floor I cut. On with the pics....
This is what I should have done with my we4 when I was doing the work on it. I'll follow this one just to see if I can steal some ideas for my over-budget buildou:
Throw up a link if you have a build on line, Id like to check it out.... theres nothing like putting 40k into a 6k car..... luckily ill be keeping this forever..... I haven't had a huge amount of time lately to work on the car but tonight I went out to the garage and finished welding all the joints in the cage that I tacked together already. I still have a few more bars to add. I have a harness bar that I need to do as well I am thinking of adding an additional door bar. I welded in some triangular pieces in the hallo part of the cage as well as the x-brace. It really tightened it up.
Thanks Im pretty excited about the ez efi set up. I have big expectations.... Thanks! Ive thought of adding a supercharger or a turbo to the 455 but Im thinking the GM block wouldn't last long :eek2:
Small update as I haven't had a lot of time to work on the car lately. I had some extra tubing laying around so I decided to add a little more support to the door bars....
More work tonight! Painted the back half of the interior of the car, and fabed up a block off plate for the space leading to the trunk. Still pondering the color of the top coat for the interior.... maybe flat black.....
Just a quick comment on my cage, as there might be some people looking at it and thinking I took some creative license with the design.... Basically what I did is I followed the minimum nhra standard for a 10 point cage and then the extra parts I added are where I wanted them, some for looks and some for chassis stability. I removed the roof so that I could re-skin it but in addition I wanted to be able to weld the entire way around each bar which isn't always possible. I was left with a bunch of gussets that I didn't need so I put them where I thought they would look good and where I figured I may need more strength. As far as the door bars the 10 point design only usually calls for one bar. I decided to add a few more in non-taditional spots so that I could still have a bit more support but also still easily get in and out of the car. Usually there are two bars called for going from the bar that goes across the main hoop (harness bar) to the trans/ drive shaft tunnel. I see them a lot on uni body cars but rarely on body on frame cars especially Regals. I decided not to put them in since I could not find a requirement for them in the nhra rule book. (Im looking to run low 11's) Anyway I don't anticipate a problem passing a tech inspection for an 11 second pass, and realistically even if I fail it will be for something I could easily fix. The welds were done with a miller 211 and penetrated for sure. Some people have mentioned (on other boards that Im on) that they don't look like they penetrated but that's because I wire wheeled the whole cage to paint and this caused the pictures to make the welds appear that they are higher than they are... which isnt the case. I decided to try out the VHT roll bar paint and it turned out nice. I got a few runs but the paint flowed out and dried well. I appreciate all the positive comments! The grand total cost of this cage since I did everything myself with paint was around $400.
