Sunday, January 11, 2009

Roll Cage Plan


One of the biggest time sinks of prepping the Turbo Schnitzel car last year was getting a roll cage into it. The XR4Ti wasn't incredibly popular, so finding a prebent cage was problematic. We ended up piecing together a kit using a main hoop intended for a dodge something-or-other and the A pillar struts from a Mustang.

I had hoped that since the Civic was a much more popular car than the XR4Ti, we'd be able to easily find a cage for it. Alas, since the Civic DX 4 door is not your usual choice for a drag car, we've had a bit of a problem finding a pre-bent cage. I guess the whole Honda tuner phenomenon was focused on coupes rather than the budget economy transportation look of the sedan. The closest I've found is a CRX cage, but it's significantly shorter than we'd need for Our Lady.

We also have a few requirements for our fan mounting, so it looks like we'll be doing a custom cage. I've scanned in the drawing of the car from the service manual and I've been using as a template to design a cage in SolidWorks. We'll do some verification of the dimesions using some PVC pipe (1-1/4" sch 40 pipe has ~1-5/8" OD). Once we have the plans in CAD we can easily make drawings and have a local shop do the bending.

1 comment:

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