DIY Roll Cage - Is it Worth It?

this is our rally project our e36 and it's currently sitting right side up but today we're going to fabricate a roll cage just in case the day ever comes that we find ourselves upside down will it really be worth all my time money and effort let's find out i'm zach welcome back to the pit baby let's bend some tubes a massive thanks to ebay motors for sponsoring today's episode now wait don't go fast forwarding because this is important today marks the halfway point of our build which means we've reached our mid-season finale now don't panic we'll be back in just a few weeks and there's still a lot to do to get the e36 rally ready but in the meantime i'm gonna be filming high low and i'm also kind of trying to relax at least a little bit this summer but hey even when i'm relaxing you know i'm still browsing ebay motors there's always going to be cars that i want to work on like the e36 and having access to ebay on my phone makes it really easy to shop online on catching a great tan and by now you guys know ebay isn't just some online car dealership flipping car after car they're committed to building a diverse inventory and a safe automotive marketplace it's where we got our wheels our steering wheel our seats and uh i guess you're just gonna have to wait to see the rest now we've used ebay all season long thanks to their fitment tool feature every part ordered has been a guaranteed fit for the e36 so get started on your own money pit today by clicking the link in the description below or by downloading the ebay motors app now i'm gonna go enjoy my summer and i hope you guys enjoy the episode now rally racing seems really cool partially because it's kind of dangerous you know you're driving off-road through the trees in the woods jumping through the air there's a lot of potential for crashing so that's why we're going to be building a roll cage to hopefully keep your boy safe in the event of destruction but i've never built a roll cage on my own and i'd really like to get it right the first try so i figured this was a great excuse for me to have a friend over and one who knows how to build a roll cage now if you've been following this channel for a while you may recognize him i did a bumper-to-bumper on his rear-wheel drive converted volkswagen gti back in the day and the thing sick mike builds all sorts of cool stuff he's got a build series on ecs tuning's youtube page you should go check it out but today he's here to do some cool stuff with me hello michael thank you for coming well with that let's get right into it we've got a lot of work to do and mike leaves in just a few short days so let's get bending actually we gotta get to stripping some sound deadening so basically what we're gonna do right now is kind of get some of the wiring out of the way and determine where the roll cage is gonna mount to the chassis then we're gonna mark that area out roughly with sharpie so that we know the areas that we need to get rid of sound deadening now a lot of people would remove all the sound deadening and that's not a terrible idea you will save some weight but it does take a lot of time and it's not a super fun process and as you may recall and we don't have time on our side so for now i think we're just going to remove sound deadening out of the areas that we need to and move on [Music] all right so we've got the sound deadening out of the way in the front four spots we don't have the rear done yet but in these spots now we're cleaning up the adhesive and just the stuff that's left behind just using a little bit of thinner and some rags just kind of get this cleaned off as well as we can then we can hit with the wire wheel to expose bare metal so that we can weld stuff in these areas really conduit this way yeah doing all the fun stuff all right we've gotten about as far as we can get with our hands it's time for power tools [Music] [Applause] so now that we have all the sound ending up and then all the seams are stripped out we're gonna start making templates for where the cage is gonna land you have to reinforce the floor so we're gonna be using eighth inch steel so i'm just playing with some spare cardboard here i'm gonna start figuring out what needs to happen so now we're gonna start cutting it out on this eighth inch plate so i'm going to give this plasma cutter a try and see how we do when it comes to building a cage for your car you really need to just pay attention to what the shape of the floor is where you're trying to make these landing pads and what the rules are it's a lot harder to add these in after the fact then do it ahead of time so now we just have to make this guy a twin and then uh clean them up bend up two opposites and put them in the car [Music] just gonna knock all the drops off the edges then around the edges and start bending [Music] all right so while mike works on the templates and the landing positions for the roll cage i'm gonna work on getting the dash out which shouldn't be that hard it looks like it's you know pretty much halfway done and i gotta help her [Music] hey she feels like she's free now it's just a dash no big deal okay now with the dash out and with mike working on those we are that much closer to actually bending up all this tube damn how are we looking boys not too bad we're getting somewhere i had nothing to do with this [Laughter] the second plate fits pretty dang good and so does the first so now we basically have four more to make and we still gotta clean up the rear mounting points ready for the lab bending process yep okay [Music] move it i'll do this forever wow pretty good so we've already cleared the inside of the car of all the sound deadening and seam sealer but the underside of the car is coated in some gunk as well and if we didn't clean this off and we welded the rail cage in this on the other side would catch on fire for sure so i'm gonna hit all this with the wire wheel get it cleaned up and attempt to prevent any good fire you know me always trying to prevent fire all right so now that we've got the car ready to accept the cage we got to talk about what kind of cage we're making and how we determine that so it's really comes down to what you're going to use the car for if you're just trying to have a little more safety and some track days or something like that where the rules aren't super strict then you can go one direction and keep the car pretty usable or if you're going into stage rally or something the car is gonna be a very serious cage and pretty hard to get in and out of uh you are going with the middle road it seems that's my road baby so we're gonna build a cage that would if we wanted to adhere to like a stage rally rule book if we kept building it but we're going to leave a few things out so it's a little bit more livable for now now that we understand that what do you need to buy what kind of materials do you use to make a roll cage depending on the weight of your vehicle most rule blocks is specify what size tubing you can use uh for your car you could have gotten away with inch and a half 120 wall or inch and three quarter 0.95 which is what we're going to use and that's a little stiffer and lighter for its own length then what about what do we got here so this is just plate just generic plate for uh making the landing pads otherwise you know this is just kind of minimum thickness and dimensions for a lot of the landing feet for the cage but that's also in most rule books okay so now that we understand the materials what kind of tools do we need to make this thing happen the biggest thing is a bender so that's the one you really can't do without so unless you got a friend with a bender you're gonna be spending some money buying one uh what else obviously a welder that's another big ticket item hopefully you got a friend with one having a mic day doesn't hurt well what else of course you need cut off wheels grinders uh i'm not sure would be great nacho makes things easier you can do without it you can kind of just do cut off wheel stuff but it does make life a little easier so it seems like we've got the plan we've gotten the materials and we've got the tools so now we got to do some planning and do some bending we're chugging right along baby this is no big deal yeah look at that somebody can still use that yeah they still use that a little cleaning all right so we're finally ready to put our seats back in and start thinking about our main hoop and mocking that up and figuring out what size and shape to make it how do we do that we're gonna go the software route hell yeah all right so yeah we're going to check out some computer software and we're going to design the main hoop and it should go pretty smoothly well captain lead the way so this is ben tech pro it's one of the options i mean if you're super familiar with the bender you're doing a ton of cage work with the same bender all the time uh that's useful i don't remember the ins and outs of where my die placement needs to be this does all that for you this will keep us from making silly mistakes that that honestly wouldn't even necessarily it's just kind of a learning process with a new bender right that's the thing we can verify all the different dimensions once we have our part you know mocked up here then we can measure the car make sure it'll fit yeah so that's my next question how do we measure the car how do we get data into this it's just a simple coordinate system so you have a starting point and then we're going to say come up from this floor pad and come up 28 inches okay right to the door line and then we're going to go to the right because we want it to fit tight in the car call it two inches it'll go to the bend location number two so this imaginary point we did here but we're gonna come up call it 17 inches and then and then we'll go to the left nine inches so now we're at the top corner or at the top corner so yeah now we have this all bent up nice or a little we got a piece and then that was quick if i remember how to do this verify so you want to close that door yeah so let's see so let's see 53 and a half 53 and a half so that's pretty good right so we got a little extra on the bottom which is nice would you ideally make it a little long in that sense and trim it to get perfect yep well tight so is that ready we're ready to cut that up yeah bend it and now we get all our our bend numbers the locations the angle and then uh yeah if there were rotation i'd tell you that too well hell yeah it's time to cut some tube bend it up yep let's do it let's make that irl you know what i mean all right my day now that we have made the hoop in the software what's the first step to actually turning it into real tube first step we're going to cut it to whatever the cut length is and then we have to mark all of our bend locations down the tube okay so you just mark that and then what just a sharpie mark at each bend location yep and that line up with the die as it goes through that's it not too bad not too bad now we cut be able to push down that's going to be a hoop now we just got to mark out our bends huh all right bend number two is that 42.197 inches all right now ben number three 61.459 inches all right bed number five 93.93 inches now we just got to bend them how exciting holding tube baby okay we got our first tube loaded up and we've got our first bend lined up now we got to bend this thing 33 degrees pull the trigger we don't even have to do manual labor here thirty three three all right on to the next bend right here all right we're moving on to our third bend which is going to be the center of our roof bend so it keeps tight to the ceiling of the car and as we move the tube through the bender we've got this digital angle gauge down here that we need to keep at zero we started out at zero and we want to make sure that as we make this we don't twist this tube this way at all so by keeping this at zero we know that we're not twisting all right and our main hoop is bent and it doesn't look so far like we messed it up but the real test is putting it in the car so let's do that do it okay so we've got our main hoop in the car and uh it looks great all our bends look like they're gonna line up perfectly we've got a little extra length at the bottom on purpose so we can trim it back and really sneak up on perfect fitment so that's what we're going to do now mark what we need to trim off the bottoms trim it and then do this again until she sits right where we want to [Music] looks relatively straight thoughts looks pretty good let's try this again close your side nice okay later down the road once we have more tubes in the roof and the diagonals going up to that b pillar we can't weld the top side so you can pull out the plates and drill holes underneath so you drop the cage through the floor which is what we're going to do here you can build little boxes in the corners and then take those out weld the top and put those back in or you can cut the roof off all together so i got everything marked up i'm just gonna use a hole saw and punch through the floor and uh should be pretty straightforward all right so we have our holes drilled the plates tacked in so we're about to tack in this b-pillar hoop um there's usually a rule on how much angle you can have on it i believe it's usually within 10 degrees or so you're pretty safe mirroring the b-pillar which is what we're gonna do and i think that looks better if it's nice and parallel so we're just teeing everything up here and then we'll tack it in another important thing is to remember to tack it in a location where you can cut it i didn't really just do that that's going to be a little annoying later but we're all tacked in we're all tacked in we're tacked in we're making some progress so now it's time to build our a-pillar pieces which are going to follow forward and come down the a-pillar and intersect the dash and land at our landing spots up front here so we've got two pieces to make to do our a-pillars and then we'll move right along so let's see what that takes i think it's time to bust out the tape measure and that software again so how many bends are we looking at well i reckon at least trace three bends and then straight down from yonder yeah we're going to come forward front words eight inches about 19 watch here i mean by my eye that's 18 and a half like fairly 90-ish all right so we have all our measurements plugged into the software so we're ready to start laying it out and bending up some tube here 6.827 inches 6.827 [Music] a pillar all right all right that looks like an a pillar looks like it fits where it's supposed to go we got this little bump out around your head here so keep your noggin safe all right well cool i mean that looks like a solid a pillar and it seems to basically fit in its place so the only things we have left to do to it we're going to make its twin for this side then get it to fit with the landing pad down there nicely which is going to be pretty easy it's almost there and we also have to notch that to meet the main hoop which i've never done i'm interested to see how mike day does this all right so let's see uh let's see this notching technique michael we're gonna do just a kind of generic cutoff wheel flap disc situation where we're just going to cut a little v in it and then round it out with the flap disc once you get that figured out you can do it by eye pretty well so now you just kind of got to shape it to get those to meet up a little bit better yep we're just going to keep rounding out these corners a little bit and now we try and see if any of that's even close what side is this hey yeah so we're gonna mark the bottom drill a hole put the plate back over it and then we can tack this so i got the passenger side all tacked in now we just have to do the same thing again on the driver's side and make its twin and then we can move on from the apollo and once we're done with this and have this side tacked in we're going to start working with the roof bars [Music] all right baby we're really cooking now look at this whole bar i just made connected to the other bar i just made we are really making some progress now it is getting late however so my boy eddie's about to take off but we're going to keep cranking at it for uh an undetermined amount of time and we'll see you guys in the morning well what do you know we're right where you left us and we've made some progress but there's more to be done so we've welded everything we can with the cage up so now it's time to remove those plates and drop the cage down through the floor and then drop the floor while the tops of all these pieces now once it's back up we can start doing the x for this main hoop all right well we've come a long way there's a roll cage in the car and it's dropped through the floor so now it's time to spray a little bit of spray paint on top of the cage the parts that would be tough to paint once the cage is in its final home so we're gonna move the car forward to get some fans going and spray some spray paint [Music] [Applause] well the top of our cage is officially painted white and it looks okay but now we got to do more of the same old stuff we got to pull the cage up and weld it into place finish up a few bars and then we got to redo all of our plastic sheeting and paint the lower half of the cage so more of the same old song and dance so we just gotta get dancing baby all right so we have the cage back up and tacked in place so now it's time to burn all these places in for real while mike's finishing up some welding in the car i'm making some plates so that we can mount the fifth point of our five-point harnesses to the car so i just need to cut a couple rectangles out of some plate put a couple bends in them put a hole in them and then put a hook through them so we can attach the fifth point so we have one of the diagonals done for the main hoop i'm working on the second some of these notches are a little tricky with so many tubes coming together an important thing to note you're always going to have a little discrepancy in your cage from one side to the other but if both x's don't line up when you look down the center of the car it'll drive you nuts [Music] only two more tubes will have to go so we have to do the harness bar across which is gonna be a two-piece harness bar because we put the diagonals as one piece so we're gonna have to throw the seats back in and make sure the harness bar lines up while we make that and uh then we're done with tubes so right now i'm trying to figure out where zack's shoulder line is and then how much angle to put on the straps that's kind of dependent on the strap manufacturer so we're taking that into account here and we're gonna start figuring out where to lay out the tube and then tack things off all right so i've got the last tube fitted up time to weld it in and move on [Music] so yeah that was it that was the last bit of welding um it's getting pretty late don't know what the plan is now oh i don't really feel like it it's a lot of mess i'm gonna get gross again well we got a cage completed in the car and now the whole car is masked off so we can paint again for the last time and then that's the last thing we're doing tonight we do have some stuff left to do tomorrow let's squirt some paint all right the cage is painted we've got a couple spots that are lifting up but we'll fix that well i'll fix that later for now it looks pretty dang good so now the only thing we got to do is close it up put it back inside and let it dry overnight great all right let's without further ado let's push this back inside and go to bed yeah perfect [Music] all right so it's a new day the cage is painted came out pretty decent all things considered so we just have a few more things to button up like putting the dash in and kind of the rest of the interior stuff and then we should be good to go all right pretty much wrapped up with the interior so the last few things to do are to undercoat kind of where we welded already so it's a bunch of bare metal that we had to strip away the sound ending from originally and we don't want that to corrode or do anything so it's not much effort to really make things last a heck of a lot longer [Music] well mike we did it we did it it seems like we did it anyway we're 99 done we have certainly put in some hours is this as much work as you expected for a cage this is definitely more work i mean i knew it was going to be a lot of work uh but i was just thinking about the cage work and then once it's done you have so much stuff to put back in so it's definitely more work than i was thinking a little bit more time than i was expecting but look at this look at the result yeah you can't argue with this exactly i didn't argue with the result and i learned a new skill so it's been a lot of work but it's been also a lot of fun in my opinion this is cool stuff to do and it's also really cool to be able to know how to do it so thank you mike oh anytime thanks for coming out showing me how to do it showing everybody how to make a cage letting us into that brain a little bit it's a dangerous place i'm sure but look at what comes out of it so thanks so much for watching this video i hope you guys learned a thing or two or 3000 from mike day uh it's been a good time for me i hope you had fun and i'll be seeing you guys next wednesday in the meantime go over to instagram and follow me at zac job follow mike mike the day like go do it right now and follow donut while you're there see you guys next wednesday

Channel: Donut Media

Views: 1,529,943

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Id: 4HfFR_zrh0o

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021