Sitting Down in a Cage

It has been a while since the last post. The Holidays and work are the reason why. However, this is the same reason why I was able to work on the car this past week. The office lets us have the week between Christmas and New Years off so to make my time worthwhile I spent most of this week over at 801 working on the car. The first thing in order to get done was finishing mounting the seat. Reading the rule there was a grey area about what can be removed to install the seat and what can't. Since we are trying to stay away from grey areas we decided to take the factory seat sliders. Cut out everything but the mounts and then use some square tubing and weld the mounts together. After this was done we realized that where the seat bracket would be wouldn't allow us to mount it. So Ryan came up with an idea that is actually what we needed. He suggested get some angle iron and bolt it through the square tubing but raise up a little bit to fit the bolts in there. Doing this will do a couple of things for us. One it will make it adjustable so if anyone in the office wishes to drive this car it will take about an hour and they will be fitted to it. Two this will help with ballast since we are very confident that we will need to add ballast to make weight so having fairly heavy sat brackets helps since it is low weight.

Pictures below: one of the seat brackets made and the other picture is the seat installed into the car. I still need to weld the nuts to the tubing/angle and clean up all the weld spatter and paint it.

Once the seat was finally mounted it was time to put the cage in its permanent place. First I aligned the cage where I wanted it to go. Then I drilled and mounted the bolts for the main hoop. This was pretty easy and other then some floor boar massaging it didn't really take much effort at all. Next came the rear braces. These would prove to be the complete opposite of the main hoop. First the design has an X brace instead of just two rearward braces going to the shock towers. The way the braces were they were hanging over the spare tire well which is not a place where you can mount cage. I had an idea of how to separate them enough to get them where they needed to be. I got the factory jack out of my Corolla and looked around 801 of something to put on that jack that would help extend to separate the braces. What I found was a post driver that was used for ProRally's. I put them in between and separated them. I went to the drivers side and looked under the car to make sure nothing was going to get in the way. Low and behold the frame was in the way. I did some measuring and realized what I needed to do was get the mounting plate over the middle on the frame so the bolts were on either side of it. That meant separating the brace even more. Finally after fighting it a little bit I was able to get them in place and mount them onto the car. The last part of the cage was the forward facing braces. These ended up being even easier to do then the main hoop. My part of the cage installation is now complete. We still need to send the car to a professional to make/weld door bars and weld the dash bar in. In the mean time I have a few things I can work on to get going like finishing up the seat brackets and make mounts for some gauges.