Chassis stiffness

[itsnotanova]

The more I think about it the more I think my original idea might work. There really isn't a great place to attach a brace to on the front of the cabin. The screw holes where the sunvisor attaches look to be the easiest place to fabricate an attachment point to. I'm starting to think the window frame might be able to handle that added stress. The A pillar is very strong. I'm bringing a boxster to scrap this week and to make it smaller I tried pushing down on the windshield with my tractor. The A pillar didn't budge with the front weight of my tractor on it. The front wheels of the tractor came a good foot or two off the ground. I had to push in the very middle of the windshield to get it to collapse and even then the A pillars were standing tall. That's maybe 1500-2500lbs pushing down on it. It's not like the brace would be forcing that much pressure on the frame? At least under normal track usage. I have a few boxster shells I could test on.

[itsnotanova]

I'm just throwing ideas out there but what about a bar down the middle? Something that attaches to the middle of the roll bar and then comes down and attaches somewhere by the lower console. That lower console comes out very easily and there's some strong mounting points down there

[thstone]

Originally Posted by itsnotanova

The more I think about it the more I think my original idea might work. There really isn't a great place to attach a brace to on the front of the cabin. The screw holes where the sunvisor attaches look to be the easiest place to fabricate an attachment point to. I'm starting to think the window frame might be able to handle that added stress. The A pillar is very strong. I'm bringing a boxster to scrap this week and to make it smaller I tried pushing down on the windshield with my tractor. The A pillar didn't budge with the front weight of my tractor on it. The front wheels of the tractor came a good foot or two off the ground. I had to push in the very middle of the windshield to get it to collapse and even then the A pillars were standing tall. That's maybe 1500-2500lbs pushing down on it. It's not like the brace would be forcing that much pressure on the frame? At least under normal track usage. I have a few boxster shells I could test on.

The windshield frame is quite strong! It is reported that the windshield frame can withstand 1.5 times the weight of the car.

If you look at the chassis image, there are boron steel reinforcements (green) that start down in the bottom of the door sill, goes up thru the chassis and then from the chassis into the A-pillar of the windshield frame. Its job is to keep the floor pan from collapsing upward and and the A-pillar from collapsing downward in a rollover.

The windshield frame header has no such reinforcement so it will deform much easier and further than the A-pillars.

With that being said, I'll have to think about connecting the windshield frame to the roll bar...