So I'm of the mind that a frame mounted cage is preferable for strength, but I think it comes with some compromises when you have a compliant-mounted body on the vehicle. I'm not quite ready to have some broletariet truggy so I decided to stick with a cage that's mounted to the body. Arguably since the seats are mounted to the body, even if the frame detached from the body, you'd at least stay in the little body capsule should worse come to worse.
People have lots of opinions on that, but they also have opinions on exo vs interior cage. I wanted this thing to protect the lives of the occupants, not necessarily protect the vehicle body. I think most exo cages look like hell too. At the same time, I couldn't figure out how to get a cage in the driver's area that wasn't in the way of my head. So, after seeing enough destroyed rolled 80s and seeing @joez hybrid cage, I decided to adopt and adapt.
Inevitable controversy. Or maybe not, whatever.
To start with, I needed a place to mount the A pillar. The front door mounts are quite stout, and when built as a system (read: a large monolithic structure connected to all 8 mounting locations), the shear strength is really high. Even with 2" .120 wall tube, I'm convinced that a REALLY bad roll would still crush the A pillar first.
So I bent up a tube.
Then removed my interior and made it look like I had been in an accident:
Started experimenting with plates that could be rosetted to the floor for sheer strength, but across a very large span to distribute the load. Additionally I bent minor profiles into a lot of them to add I-value.
Started jabbing tubes through the roof and down into sandwich plates that capture parts of the body with multiple bolts near large seamed areas:
People have lots of opinions on that, but they also have opinions on exo vs interior cage. I wanted this thing to protect the lives of the occupants, not necessarily protect the vehicle body. I think most exo cages look like hell too. At the same time, I couldn't figure out how to get a cage in the driver's area that wasn't in the way of my head. So, after seeing enough destroyed rolled 80s and seeing @joez hybrid cage, I decided to adopt and adapt.
Inevitable controversy. Or maybe not, whatever.
To start with, I needed a place to mount the A pillar. The front door mounts are quite stout, and when built as a system (read: a large monolithic structure connected to all 8 mounting locations), the shear strength is really high. Even with 2" .120 wall tube, I'm convinced that a REALLY bad roll would still crush the A pillar first.
So I bent up a tube.
Then removed my interior and made it look like I had been in an accident:
Started experimenting with plates that could be rosetted to the floor for sheer strength, but across a very large span to distribute the load. Additionally I bent minor profiles into a lot of them to add I-value.
Started jabbing tubes through the roof and down into sandwich plates that capture parts of the body with multiple bolts near large seamed areas: