Mike's 900 cage progress

[Geoff]

whose car and what is that with the busted strut? VW?

Sounds like a blast. Is that the enduro that I hear about every year but still haven't made it to? I thought it was 4 or 6 hours long though.

[Rallyho]

The broken strut was from a nice looking VW rabbit truck...looked way too nice to be ice racing.

Yeah, same race. 3hr enduro now...guess they're going soft.

Some of the NH boys are threatn' to come up and throw down...we'll take pics fer sure.

[Luke]

Whats with the double skinning on the rockers? extra protection for stumps? Cage looks awesome by the way. Think you'll have her ready for Maine Forest?

[Rallyho]

Those are double skinned in prep for seat rails which will run across there.

[Luke]

duh, that makes a lot more sense than my explanation

[Rallyho]

MFR is definitely the goal I've set. But as you well know, where I am right now is the toughest to gauge progress on. Much of the work is solo, with Brett coming up a few times to do welding, cage stuff, etc. And I'm not a master fabricator, so my ideas about shock mounts and such may not come to fruition.

Not to mention that there are all the systems left to do:
Brakes
Electrich
Steering
Susp

It just makes my head hurt!

A chunk of $$, and two weeks with 3-4 guys working every day and we'd be testing by April!

[Luke]

Yeah theres always that trade off of building the car how you know it should be done and how you want it to be, and then building it so that you actually have a chance in driving it before there are no more fossil fuels. My opinion is that as long as you cover the basics and build a nice clean car with a good strong cage then the you can always change some things and add improvements later. Lets face it a rally car is never trulely done, theres always that big list of improvements to make.
With that said, heres the things I wish I done at the initial build and not later:

-Cleaning the whole shell of all undercoating and goop and painting in a durable paint.
-Scrapping the stock wiring and building a custom or universal harness.
-Adding the front reinforments to the cage

[Crazyswede]

This is of course this same with any motorsport. I have quite a list of things to do to my DRZ400 woods/enduro/rally bike including:

Full tear down and replacement of wheel bearings and seals, suspension linkage bearings, swing arm bearings, steering head lube, frame cleaning and possible repaint, Redo the wiring harness, new headlights, steering stabilizer, clutch, bigger gas tank, exhaust, possible extra tanks etc etc.

[Rallyho]

That's the stuff I'm wrestling with. What do I need to do now, that will be a total bitch to do later.

Some things in no particular order that I think fall into the now vs later category:

Cage
Susp mounting
Wiring
shell prep

Easy stuff to change are:

engine
trans
brakes
fuel (relatively)

[Luke]

Maybe think about the skid plate and its mountings sooner than later too. That could have some influence on exhaust routing and oil cooler mounting and stuff like that. A pain to go and beef up your skidplate later and then have to build a new downpipe.

[Rallyho]

Brett and Groo came way up to Maine and worked on the car this weekend.

Some good progress. Cage is done!!!!


http://picasaweb.google.com/thewhitesal ... 7GarageDay

[Geoff]

so the upright bar that goes from the top of the A pillar down to the bottom of the side bar: What was the measurement? Over 200mm?

Cage is done so time to run!!

[Rallyho]

Time to run.....yeaaaaah, riiiiight.

Now all that's left to do is everything.

Friggn' cage rules. Very difficult to figure out what I had to have and what I didn't. For instance, I'm not positive a sill bar is required. But a straight answer could not be found.

That A-Pillar thing....yeah, 200mm and depending on where-to-where you measured I was either just under or just over...so I caned Brett until he welded one in there.

The door X has a slight bent to it, so it pushes out towards the door card. With the sill bar, a-pillar thing and the tacos in there, it looks sooo boss that this old man gets good bumps.

I'm sure that this fright pig is going to weigh like 3600 lbs when I'm done.

[Luke]

Looks nice! Do you have the drivetrain all ready to drop in?

[Geoff]

I'm sure that this fright pig is going to weigh like 3600 lbs when I'm done.

With that much protection even I might not be afraid to get in it with you!

Your old cage weighed around 100lbs. This new one probably has twice the number of bars so lets say it weighs 200 to 250lbs. Not too bad...