A couple days ago I bent the front passenger side loop. All was well until the very last (bottom) bend. For the passenger side it would have been okay where it is, but for the driver’s side I felt the bar would be better if it angled more quickly once under the dash so it gave more clearance for the clutch foot.

So, after much hemming and hawing, I bent the driver’s side differently. That turned out better, which meant redoing the passenger side.

You can see a comparison of them below. It’s tough to visualize where the floor/firewall will be, but the sheet metal gives a rough idea.

Once I get the passenger loop done, the remaining bars ought to be completed more quickly.

However, before I could do that Thursday night we discovered a leak underneath the bathroom of our master bedroom. Ugh. We don’t know when it actually broke, but Thursday night, we could hear a strange noise in the bathroom. Of course, we were about ready for bed, which meant getting re-dressed and dropping into our crawl space where I shut off the water to our house. Friday morning I crawled the length of the house, where I discovered where the water was falling on the plastic. The actual break was in the insulation, but I didn’t locate it. I’d rather get a pro to deal with it.

So, we are house-camping again. On the upside, we tried out the shower in our shop for the first time. It turns out, it works great!

We have a plumber (highly recommended and the uncle of our neighbor) coming tomorrow to look at it, as I’d rather not work with the copper pipe. I want to get it done quickly and get it done right … I got a cage to finish!

On Sunday, I was able to tack together the basic structure of the rear portion of the cage. On Monday, I began work on the front portion.

Here’s a look a the back portion with the body sitting on the frame:

There are still a number of small things to do to complete the rear portion (such as adding rear shock mounts, adding some corner supports, and, of course, welding all the connection points).

To properly calculate the two long side bars, which will run from the mid part of the frame back to the rear loop, I needed the body to be sitting on the frame.

Each side bar has four bends, so getting them both the same is a good challenge.

After LOTS of measurements, angle considerations, and design thoughts, I finally got around to bending the two most difficult angles on the side bar. Below you can see the passenger side bar temporarily in position, though the lower two bends haven’t been finished yet (next bend will direct the bar vertically at the dash, then the final bend will redirect the bar forward under the dash where it will attach to a still-to-be-added cross bar.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get as far as I’d hoped, because Ann had a bad migraine, so I had to take the dogs to the groomers (which they needed pretty badly, as bad weather forced us to cancel two previous appts over the past two months).

I expect that by Friday I’ll have all the bars bent, positioned, and maybe even welded.

Bad cows …

I had big plans to work out early and get out to the shop. But, just as I finished my lifting, our neighbor Andrew texted me at 7:30am, “I got a text from my neighbor Dan Green. Your cows are in his pasture.”

Ugh. There went my early start in the shop.

We piled on clothes (below freezing this morning), loaded up the UTV, and headed over to Andrew’s fence line (the cows have been borrowing Andrew’s pasture). Sure enough, the cows had created a nice wide entrance in the wire fence.

The moment the cows heard our UTV, they recognized it was feeding time, so we lured six of them back to Andrews pasture. Of course, one dumb cow, our 7mo steer, couldn’t figure out how to get back through the fence, so, of course, he went over another part of the non-barbed wire fence, damaging it. Ugh.

Once at Andrew’s pasture, we wooed them over to our pasture with food and closed the access gate to Andrew’s place. With the cows grounded, we went to work on the fence.

Thankfully, it didn’t take too long to fix the fence. I.believe our two mischievous 2yo steers (they become meat next month) were leaning over the fence to get some tall grass in Dan Green’s pasture, which caused the fence to collapse. Bad cows.

Now for the cage progress. I’ll skip the explanation (am tired) and just get straight to the pics. The big loop is completed, along with the back bars and the rear cross bar. Everything is, level, square, tacked-in-place, and ready for more bars.

There will be no work on Friday (quick trip to Seattle), but I plan to get back to it this weekend. I’ll add more bars for strength, then begin work on the front loop.

More-months-than-I-care-to-think-about ago (about seven months I think), I bought a cheap Affordable Bender. When it arrived, I was less than impressed with the collar (see this post). So, I called them, only to learn that the collar was designed that way and should work fine (I believe they told me “Billions” of bends have been done with Affordable Benders, or something like that).

So, I decided to test the bender before sending it back; I hadn’t expected to wait 7 months to test it!

Yesterday, I mounted it to my metal work table and tested it with a 90 degree bend, one of two I need for the racer’s main loop (it’s the most difficult bend of the entire roll cage). The bender comes with a 90 degree die, so I was a little worried wether the bender would do a 90 degree bend.

First off, it didn’t take me long to miss my old bender, the one I built from plans: http://www.ewillys.com/2009/10/08/my-tube-bender-almost-done/. But, since I couldn’t access my plan (lock PDF with no password and the author of the PDF wouldn’t answer my emails), I had to buy this AFF bender.

Here are the results of the 90 degree bend .. as you can see, it stops short of a 90 degree bend:

Ugh .. what It meant is that I had to force the 15′ tube through the collar a few inches so I could add an additional bend. While that worked, I bent it too far (I misread my level .. it went to 90 degrees which I missed, then started down to 88, so I thought it was at 88 and needed to go to 90. UGH .. had to start over).

Eventually, I got the hang of how to do a 90 degree bend with this and managed to create the loop below.

This pic shows the first 90 finished and I’m starting on the second.

This shows the second 90 done. That is all the 90s I need, so the rest of the bends should be much easier.

I still have two more bends on this loop (the bars are parallel, though don’t look that way in the pics), which I’ll complete tomorrow.

I’ve spent parts of the last couple of days thinking through how/where the new cage will attach, how the floor should attach, and how the body should attach and where it should sit. For example, the body must be far enough forward so that the solid front clip can slip over the front of the radiator, but back far enough to sit in the right area in the back.

My initial intention was to bolt the cage fo the frame, but this frame (already cut and spread 5″) has enough mods that if I’m at a point that the cage has to be removed to make changes, I’m better off starting with a new frame (and, at this point, I don’t want to do a ground up rebuild).

Additionally, the body has warped some, so I will need to build a jig out of wood so that I can try to straighten the body some (apparently, using a heat gun, I should be able to remove some of the warping. What I can’t re-straighten, I will use fiberglass and/or some (probably) aluminum plates placed strategically to make it look straighter.

Here’s a couple pics of the body. You may not be able to tell, but both sides of the front of the body have flexed outward. So, between the heat gun, the jig, some interior plating, and the use of strategic mounts, I should be able to make it look a little less out of whack.

Over the next week we are supposed to have (finally) dry weather and temps that will be in the high 40s and low 50s, so I hope to get the cage built and, maybe, the body cleaned up to ready for some fiberglass repair and, eventually, some paint.

Though I dislike the neon green chassis, Ann has acquired a taste for it, so I might start with the body painted black, similar to the narrow body that was on it.

UPDATE: Today I removed the tube bender from its box, only to find that the collar for the tube bender had irregular holes that had been “patched” by welding two spacers to the outside of it. But, that modification meant that the bolt was no long enough, meaning one of the two sides of the collar would be riding over the threads. Given the importance of the collar, this “fix” is unacceptable, so this bender will get returned.

Below you can see that both holes are irregular, so a spacer has been welded to the outside. What are these people thinking? 

The bolt next to the collar is the stock bolt. I happened to have a similar bolt that was longer and better for this application. However, given the poor quality collar, I will be returning this device.

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As mentioned, a couple weeks ago we had the estate sale, which consumed WAY too much of my time. First there was the setup. Then, there was the rain, so then we had to re-setup using part of the shop (which meant moving stuff out of the shop like the race jeep), hanging tarps to hide tools, etc. In the end, the rain stopped Saturday at 4am and began Sunday at 3pm, which gave us a decent window to sell stuff.

We sold or gave away quite a bit, but there were still multiple trips to donation centers, a trip to recycling, and several trips to the dump. Then, once completed, we still had to reorganize the remainder.

The good news is that a lot of crap left the shop, which gives me much more room than I’ve had. Also. good news, the weather has finally warmed up, with blue sky and no rain.

So, I finally returned to work on the racer, though the work was mostly grinding/cutting off the remaining pieces of the rear front spring holders and the former mounts of the side bars. With that done, I can now fit the new side bars.

Before:

After:

I’d prefer to take the whole thing apart to better clean up and paint the frame, but that can wait until winter. For now, I am focusing on functionality over style (though the green will be painted black before the body is installed).

With the grinding done, I’m not far from being able to begin work on the roll cage. The new cage will be wider (for the wider Parkette body) and roomier (so I fit better). To build the cage I needed to get some new tools.

My plasma cutter arrived a few days ago, along with my tube bender (from Affordable Bender). I was going to build another bender, but I cannot locate printed copies of my bender plans nor can I find the password to the PDF I received from gotTrikes.com (locked PDF .. and no response from the gotTrikes website for a new password). So, after some research, I decided to take a chance on the AffordableBender, which as gotten pretty good reviews.

The thing I am awaiting now is my new MIG welder, which was supposed to arrive around June the 9th. It is now expected to arrive June 29th.