TARP Blog

Things got off to a slow start yesterday owing to yet another kiddo soccer game, but I was out in the garage and working by 3:00. Daylight starts burning fast now and my top priority for the day was the last thing that would hold us up in tech: the new door bars. More after the jump:

Thanks again to Paul for bending and shipping the bars to me. I had been having trouble fishmouthing them, as my drill press doesn’t get down slow enough for the hole drill to do anything but break off teeth. Then I remembered that you can cut the ends at 45 degrees and do a little grinding on them and then you have a fishmouth that way. Well, it took a lot of grinding, but eventually I got the bar ends shaped right and everything fit tight enough for me to start welding. I’ve been practicing on some scrap and that definitely has helped out. My welds are ugly as all get out (and it’s not helped by the fact that I’m just using flux-core wire rather than wire and gas), but they’re finally solid. Getting the bars fit tightly makes a big difference, too. After the welds cooled, I tested them all with the sledgehammer (same way they would get tested in tech) and nothing fell off or clanged loose, so I think we’re all good. As you can see in the photos below, we now have 3 door bars (2 are required under the new LeMons cage rules). The 2 new ones are the bendy ones from Paul. I left in our original one because (a) it was less work to just leave it in, (b) I figure it’s safer if we have one more bar in there, and (c) it wasn’t really in the way. So I think we should be super-safe from driver’s side impacts.

Here are a couple of before shots:

Here’s the first weld on the lower front bar:

And with the second bar:

And here’s what they look like from the outside:

After I took that shot, I shot all the bare metal with a couple coats of flat black paint for corrosion protection and then put the roll bar padding on the interior bar and the vertical bar on the left side of that photo. Might put some on the top door bar too, but it kinda depends on how close the outside of the bar is to the door skin when I put the door back on the car.

After I finished up the door bars, there were a few other odds and ends to finish up, but nothing else major got done.  Tonight I’ll get the windshield re-installed and take on some of the other tasks, including probably doing the oil pan. Cheers guys.

Race Prep Author: Pat