SilverGhost Rises

Haha. I think I messed up mine too. That tube on a bend was something hard to get used to.

 

Damn right, I do!

This truck is gonna be beefy as hell, Ray. You should keep track of how many pounds of welding wire and electrodes you end up going through. We can start a pool and see who comes closest.

 

Yeah it’s a mother to try and get that perfect. I was getting used to it until yesterday when @Blackdawg said something. Now I just stare at it thinking yeah I could of tried again. But.... all the other tubes that tie into it sit so dam good right now and I don’t want to redo all of it. SOB. Makes a good hand rest when I’m driving tho

Yeah no joke. Like seriously when I went to pick up the tube I tried lifting it all at once and I was like what the fuck am I doing adding this much weight. Plus that is just a small portion being added. It’s going to be interesting to see how much she weighs when it’s done. There is no way I can keep track of the weight of welding materials being added. To many bigger projects in my head.

 

The pvc is looking strong Ray

 

those pvc actually helped a lot with some of the tubes. Some of them got pretty good and all I had to do was copy them.

 

I believe that. I think your skill has increased tenfold as this has gone on Ray. Really impressive

 

haha

 

It’s all good.

 

Are you going to remove these and 360 weld the tubes under? I am not 100% sure but that was how I did all of mine, roll cage "rules" say that ALL tubes must be welded 360*. Its hard to find specifics but I went the safe route and welded tubes like that 360* before I put the next tube in. But its hard to find if it counts on overlapping tubes to just weld around both and make one big 360, if that makes sense

 

That’s what I was planing on doing. I’m still figuring it out in my head because like you noticed a lot of the notches over lap. The end goal is to 360 every tube. Right now I’m just cutting and fitting everything. I’ll strip the cage once I have all the pieces made, I’ll clean the tubes and paint (except joints) then put everything back in sections welding together as I go. It’s looking like from top to bottom is how I’m going to do it.

 

Gotcha, that will change the fitment a little bit though just heads up. The really tight tubes may need a little extra notching right where they go over a weld bead. What I did was weld anything that would be covered before installing the next tube, but obviously you would still have the parts of the cage you can't reach (very top) until you drop the cage, so you cant fully weld all 360 all at once anyway. So its a lot of "weld this now, but wait to weld the rest of this tube until later". Coming along very nicely though

 

Thanks for the tip. I’ll keep this in mind. Thanks

 

All the extra weight will effect your height and distance at the next Mall snow drift jumping contest. You can counter those effects by standing on the throttle .
Great work man . Catching up on your build has me wanting to work on my crawler but the 102 temps have me saying faaawwkkkk that.

 

Yeah man wait for winter. We’re trained to work in extreme weather but we’re getting old so comfort is more important

 

Spotted you turning off pecos onto 76 as I was also turning off pecos onto 76. You should keep the look man

 

Ha! No way. This is temporary.

 

Still undecided. But I just might move the axle back an inch. This will move the lower link front mount back an inch and extend the length of the upper link one inch. Or I might move the upper mount back. I was playing with the numbers last night and only changed my anti squat from 76 to 77 so I’m still within 80 that is around where I want to be.

Doing this I would have to move my glass back about 1/2 and have a 3/4 gap in the glass and cab. I still need to play with the upper mounting location of the shocks. But this should give me the clearance I need for the coilover. I still need to graph it out to see how everything lines up.

 

@Blackdawg Today I had to give a buddy a ride to work. He is a lot taller then I. Guess what, the top of his head sat inbetween the tubes in the roof. Made me worry even more. Even though every thing fits tight it is just way to low. So if your going to do a cage, do it right. Time to start over, on the roof that is. Good news though is that those bends in those tubes and the length of them will work for the rear of the roof so I'll be able to reuse them and just adjust the notches just a lttile bit. I tried adjusting the notches in the tube across the a pillar and even though I got it to line up right there is just to much of a gap in the notch to make it work. So that one I'm going to use as a stencil and make another. I'll work that piece into the bed cage somewhere after im done with it. No biggie.

 

Bummer. But good to address it now.