You Think You Have A Roll Cage?

At-Least-It's-An-Evo · 04-10-2004

Think this is legal to run 10s?

Here's more info.

http://www.dsmtalk.com/forums/showthread.p...threadid=117337

**1ViciousGSX** · 04-10-2004

just a little bit of overkill, don't ya think. Our car weigh enough already and he adds 250lbs of cage and plates. :goodluck:

MATCHBX · 04-10-2004

Yeah, if you read down in the post, he did it that much in case he decides to get back into rally. He won a championship in the NEDIV in a Celica. With those cages, it has to withstand a million different types of impacts in rallies so you need many more bars in it than if he just ran 1/4 miles.

**JET** · 04-10-2004

The rear end will survive, but it doesn't look like he did anything to the front except for the normal bars. Seems odd to me!

MATCHBX · 04-10-2004

Are you kidding me!!! Look at the A-pillars, the door bars and all the bracing all around. The doors have cross bars and upper corner bars. The A-pillars are braced to the roll cage. Later on in the post he explains all the seam welding that he did also. That car is VERY rigid!!!

Take a look at this pic to see what he did to the doors. The one thing that he did WRONG was bracing the front strut towers to the cage. Now that is just a problem waiting to happen. I feel sorry for the passengers feet when they hit something head on!!!

**JET** · 04-10-2004

I guess the front bars weren't in there on the 2nd pic. That thing must add a good 300 lbs to the car though. If you hit something hard enough to need all of that support, you will die from the impact anyway. Crush zones are your friend!

MATCHBX · 04-10-2004

Exactly the reason why you don't tie your cage to your front strut towers. These are unibody cars and they are made to crumple in certain spots. That way the engine goes beneath the floorboards instead of crushing the firewall onto your feet. This guy really needs to rethink where he needs structural rigidity. Or just needs to get his feet crushed from an impact to find out why he meesed up.

sideways motorsports · 04-11-2004

Actually I dont know of any rally prep-shop that doesnt tie in to the front strut towers. Biggest reason for doing it is so the strut towers and attached lower frame dont move, not the motor/tranny/crush zones. With very stiff springs on rally suspention (ive seen up to 550# springs) the strut towers are the first to get destroyed. No normal street car will take that kind of abuse for very long with out some extra structural help. The swift actually twisted its frame (1.25 inches) over time with the pounding the suspention gets, and that was with extra support. I dont believe that these modifications will not allow the car to crumple when it needs to, these guys are just making sure it doesnt in other areas. That is the whole point for a roll cage.

just 2 or 3 cents

Dan Moore

MATCHBX · 04-11-2004

It's fine to tie the the towers to the unibody frame, but not to the cage. It makes the front end way to rigid. And in an accident, the engine can actually make it's way into the cabin. You heard about the incident at Missouri, didn't you? The co-driver had his ankles crushed because of this.

sideways motorsports · 04-13-2004

I would have to see some solid evidence that the strut towers tied to the cage had anything to do with that before I didnt do it to my vechicle.

I dont think that it would have made a diffrence in either case. If you are traveling at speed and center punch a tree, whatever you hit the tree with is going to grenade.

I have a great example in my back yard. Speed racer in his 02 WRX hit something and the bumper hit the motor witch hit the fire wall completly taking out the tranny mount etc. etc. Nothing attached to the strut towers were touched. The frame bent where it needed to bend and the motor/tranny would have traveled under the car just like it was supposed to if he had been going any faster.

I would have to blame the motor/tranny coming into the car more on the under body protection or something that would make it not go the direction it was designed to.

In my opinion there would be no diffrence in a major accident if the towers were tied in or not. And I would have to think that beefing up the strut towers and or around them would either have the same effect or worse since your frame might not be able to use its crush zone if it had been tied in that far.

Just another 4 or 5 cents.

Dan