Rusty Rockers

Skye Wrote:
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> Hmmm but seems like it would be a royal pain
> during service, repairs, trapping mud and
> moisture, ripping off and dragging around, etc

Hence me trying to find a good way to bolt it on...I've spent enough time fixing holes in the floor of this car already, I'll take the extra 5min to unbolt this stuff instead.

its kinda like the stuf cutting boards are made of.

Good point I forgot about abrasive the roads are here. I'm used to nice gravel on clay soil or dry, that's what we have in southern BC.

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www.rallyrace.net

Weld plates with captive nuts where you want it to mount. Or use those threaded rivet nut thingies. Anything bolted though and you're probably much more likely to have it ripped off and/or shaken loose.

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Grant Hughes

I have NEVER lost a piece of UHMW that we have attached to the underside of the car with Stainless rivets. (mudflaps excepted for obvious reasons) A plus that goes along with the rivets is that they end up flush and are not as inclined to wear away as an expised bolt-head. Place the UHMW in a spot where it will NOT have to be removed. Want the skid plate to live forever? Attach UHMW to it.

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JohnLane

Volvo 260turbo AKA The Fire Breathing Monster
Overkill is consistently more fun

John Lane Wrote:
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> I have NEVER lost a piece of UHMW that we have
> attached to the underside of the car with
> Stainless rivets. (mudflaps excepted for obvious
> reasons) A plus that goes along with the rivets is
> that they end up flush and are not as inclined to
> wear away as an expised bolt-head. Place the
> UHMW in a spot where it will NOT have to be
> removed. Want the skid plate to live forever?
> Attach UHMW to it.

We rivited with large head rivets. Our car is relatively flat bottomed, didn't have to wrap it all the way up like derek's car, so was easy.

Some of the rivets nearest the tunnel ground down and are now gone, so the sheets are drooping a bit, but that is after a full season, and they may have been aluminum (don't remember). We're going to put a couple of bolts there this time around (probably cairrage head).

We have no need to ever remove them, and they aren't likely to ever come off unintentionally... Originally they partially covered some of the mounts for the front suspension, we modified it for clearance and now its perfect.

Cuts down noise drastically and having a sacrificial material greatly increases the longevity of the car. On a front wheel drive car, it is a necessity both from gravel/sandblasting and noise. They take a real beating, who knows what the car would look like without them.

get a piece of 1" or 3/4" square steel tubing.

zap it to the pinch "flange" on the bottom of the rockers.

purpose is 2 fold.

1. Will strengthen the weak rusted rockers.
2. Gives you a nice solid place to mount the stuff (use screws, bolts, welded nuts...whatever

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Chris

john vanlandingham Wrote:
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> THEN if you want the repair is a snap, 1 piece
> outboard curving downwards and one piece inboard
> curving down to make a new "pinch Rail" Sorta like
> this: Y


So since it was nice out today (like 3 degrees, spring is in the air!), I was out noodling on the car, and the more I ground at the rust to weld in a repair piece, the more the metal kept disappearing.

Soooooo, is there any special engine-earing reason for having the pinch rail joining the floorboard, inner rocker, and rocker cover in the 'Y' as opposed to just bending them to meet in an "L"? Like, if I hit my remaining "Y" bits with a hammer, they just fall off, so do I need to go to the hassle of making a new one, or can I just patch it with some "L" shaped bends and make a new rocker out of steel tube?

ps, I REALLY should have fawking done this stuff when the car was sideways...what a pain in the drain to weld on slightly rusty metal overhead...

I'm not an engineer yet, but my gut feeling is no. The reason why it rolls to a Y is probably PURE aesthetics. There has to be a seam somewhere and they are ugly, so you want them out of sight as possible and in a location that won't rust to shit faster than they already do.

There is of course some strength from the shape of the rocker.. if you want to completely nuke it, you should make sure your cage/square tube replacement will take up the slack is anchored well. But I have to note that I see rockerless rust buckets going down the road all the time, they are however not rally cars.

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Andrew M
Onterrible
30ish



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/06/2006 10:38AM by hudson.

> Soooooo, is there any special engine-earing reason
> for having the pinch rail joining the floorboard,
> inner rocker, and rocker cover in the 'Y' as
> opposed to just bending them to meet in an "L"?
> Like, if I hit my remaining "Y" bits with a
> hammer, they just fall off, so do I need to go to
> the hassle of making a new one, or can I just
> patch it with some "L" shaped bends and make a new
> rocker out of steel tube?

They're easier to spotweld that way, give a nice convenient place for a scissors jack, and the added spine thingy might make things marginally stiffer, at least before it crumbles to dust. Probably mostly the spotweld thing.

Additionally, one of the OEMs was going to cut down/eliminate the pinch rail on a new body design a couple years back, save a littlw weight. They were also working with insurance companies and repair-industry types to design in such a way as to make the cars cheaper/easier to repair. As it turns out a lot of body shops clamp the shells by the pinch rail in the course of straightening a car out, so they ended up leaving the rail in.

You're not a body shop or an assembly line robot, though... Well I guess in a sense you'rw a body shop now

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Pete Remner
Cleveland, Ohio

1984 RX-7 (rallycross thing)
1978
Silence is golden, but duct tape is silver.

Paddy,

I cut my rockers right off, had some new ones bent up out of 18 guage (about twice the thinkness of the originals). welded them on... also got while I was in there I put in some short pieces of box section with 1.5" tube for the jacking points. The Y seam went away in the process. I haven't figure out how I'll attach my protection... usually it just rolls on and stays there :-)
Don't use sheet metal screws as they fall out and stick in tires...


http://www.neo240sx.ca/Nismo/Martin/rally/100_1317.JPG

-Martin