With the interior all painted up and ready, it was time to install
the roll cage. This has to be done before anything else goes back into
the interior, as it requires a fair bit of messing around to get it
into place. As I went for a full multipoint bolt-in kit (see pic right),
getting it into position is a fair bit tricker than a simple 6 point
cage. This is mainly due to the cross bracing on the rear section of
the roll cage. For a simple cage without cross-bracing, you can simply
put a crank strap round the bottom of the legs and ease them towards
each other so they clear the B pillars easily, but you can't, of course,
do this with a cross-braced cage. My cage has the added complication of,
in addition to having the crossed diagonal bracing on the rear part of
the cage, having a cross brace bar between the bottom of the B pillar
legs of the cage (see pic). This means that not only can you not constrict
the bottom of the legs, but the door bins also have to be removed. This
neccessitates swapping the standard seat belts for harnesses, as the front
seat belt inertia reels are mounted on the edge of the door bins (see pic).
Not that this affected my plans in any way, as I've already bought some
nice 3 point inertia reel harnesses from Safety Devices, which bolt in to
the C pillar seat belt mounts and the base mountings for the front seat belts.
While they aren't FIA approved, they're still much better than regular seat
belts, while being much more suited to road use than regular harnesses.
I decided to chop out the whole of the door bins, leaving just enough metal to support the rear seat bench, not that it will be able to take any serious, weight, but then it doesn't have to - all it needs to do is provide a fixing point for the spare wheel mount.
Getting the rear cage into position is just a case of forcing it past the B pillars, though this does result in the removal of paint from the B pillar :-) Once the rear section is in place, the front section is just assembled loosely in place and then looosely bolted together. Once assembly is complete, the bolts holding the rollcage together are then tightened up.
The next stage is to bolt the rollcage to the shell. This is very straightforward, if a bit awkward in places - I started by drilling the holes for the rearmost mounting on the wheelarch and bolting the rear legs in place. In order to make removal of the bolts as easy as possible
I decided to chop out the whole of the door bins, leaving just enough metal to support the rear seat bench, not that it will be able to take any serious, weight, but then it doesn't have to - all it needs to do is provide a fixing point for the spare wheel mount.
Getting the rear cage into position is just a case of forcing it past the B pillars, though this does result in the removal of paint from the B pillar :-) Once the rear section is in place, the front section is just assembled loosely in place and then looosely bolted together. Once assembly is complete, the bolts holding the rollcage together are then tightened up.
The next stage is to bolt the rollcage to the shell. This is very straightforward, if a bit awkward in places - I started by drilling the holes for the rearmost mounting on the wheelarch and bolting the rear legs in place. In order to make removal of the bolts as easy as possible