Home made rollcages.

Hi,
I used to rally Land Rovers for the army and, like Wingman, found the best results using Evergreen rod. A little tip, when joining pieces together, use a little more glue than you normally would. Squeeze them together, let dry, clean up the joint and it will look like a weld.

I haven't looked around but are you going to be the first to reach 1000 posts here Blackwolf? Cool...

Anyways, I bought a pack of .080 Evergreen rod at the hobby shop yesterday for $2.00. 6pcs 14 inches long. Matter of fact I got several different sizes of rod, tubing, strips and sheet and none of it other than the sheet was more than $2 a pack.

A buddy of mine makes his out of aluminum rod soldered together. But he's nuts to begin with...


Fade to Black...

If I were going to go to all that trouble I'd use new materials for the job. Besides, the sprues will probably be of larger diameter than what you need and then there is all that trimming. If there is a decent hobby shop in your area they should have a stock of Evergreen or Plastruct styrene in all sorts of sizes and shapes. Just about anything you could imagine. Especially if they sale railroading stuff. There's also K&S tubing and sheet in aluminum, brass, copper, tin. None of it is very expensive, particularly the styrene. All the manufacturers have websites so you could check it out online.

If you could find a copy, Car Modeler 2002 has a detailed article on scratchbuilding a roll cage for a stock car and may help with the brainstorming part of the project. There's very detailed instructions and the author goes as far as showing you how to build the jigs he used.

If you haven't completed your project yet and can't find the mentioned mag, send me an email.

Those are good ideas. I had been toying with the sprues idea, wasnt sure if that would work. I will play around with it and see what happens. When I get that done, Ill come back with more questions.. Thank you for the help..

Another alternative might be to see if you can get some 'solder' in a size that would be close to the roll cage in scale. I use smaller diameter solder all the time for wires and other things. Medium diameter stuff works well for tubing and hoses. Larger diameter works pretty good for headers and exhaust stuff.

Murray

Basically use the sprues the rest of the kit came with. Cut, heat and bend into any shape you want. Remember to sand down some of the rougher edges as sprues aren´t the manufacturors main focus of neatness attention, although with some manufacurors you sometimes have to wonder..