Roll Bars. Part 1

Well its time to bite the bullet! But I plan to do it over a couple of days.

Before the body went on, I trial fitted the roll bars and found the rear legs needed slightly pulling into align with the holes. This saved me lots of hassle for when the body went on as I will be making templates for the holes from the legs.

Did a bit of reading up how others tackled them as there are no real surfaces to use as a reference for drilling the holes in the top of the body.
So easy to mess up and hard to hide any cockups.

So I opted to go for the studding route.
Some use a plum bob but my garage floor isn't level lengthways so neither is the car on axle stands. But it is level sideways.


I got some 12mm studding, measured and cut it to have enough for a nut top and bottom of the chassis mounts and to reach the top of the boot and drilled a 6mm hole saw guide for the 2 mail legs.
Small pilot holes drilled/dremeled from below the body, the inside most leg was done with the angle drill and a 12mm bit of scrap with a 6mm hole in it for a 6mm drill through the chassis rail. Then hole sawed out to 61mm. The 2 main bars are 50.5mm or 2" so the bottom holes wont catch the bars.

The outer holes were hole sawed with a bit of studding that I drilled a 6mm guide hole into and bolted into position.
The rear support is different on the Euro to the Jag chassis as it fits in under the body with plenty of room.
With the studding close to the top and the nuts tight, I measured the centres all the way up.
I then did the same the other side to make sure it looks the same and that I didn't do anything silly.

Triple checked everything,
No going back now!

(Latex gloves on, itchy hands from fibreglass dust drive me mad.)
Moved the studding back and tightened them back up again to see how they lined up through the top. I noticed that the hole moved a bit if the stud was rotated. hmmmmm.....
I wasn't happy with it and it felt like one of them was slightly off vertical as the centres were a little off as I measured up.
So I decided to make an extra spacer/centre jig. I measured the roll bar centres and drilled them level into a bit of plank and they were snug over the studs. Looked better and measured up bang on.

Here we go....


Slid them in back-to-front to check the main legs for now. All pretty much bang on!
Well chuffed. Will leave it there for tonight.