just curious as to how everyone went about building their chassis. In the book, Ron obviously starts with the bottom rails. But when watching "A Racing Car is Born" on discovery channel, I noticed it seems like Westfield builds it module by module, or at least they make the sides separately, something which seems like a good idea if you have a lack of space and can pull it off...

I'm also curious as to where you guys find the plastic parts...

I tried building the top rails first, but try as I might I couldn't get them to hover whilst I built the bottom!!!!!

Westfields are built on a jig, bottom rails first.

Darren from GTS who post on here does good GRP as does the site sponsor.

Cheers

Chris

I actually ended up building the passenger section first as the size of the tunnel dictated the nodes to the front as well as the diff box. But it certainly isn't a book chassis. Cheers!

We tag weld all flat sections, bottom, top, sides and so on separately. We sketch on a board and clamp the tubes.
Cheers!

I just followed the books recomendations, not hard at all, and if you want to make the cassis, all you really need is a 10' x 4 1/2' space, you wont have room for running gear, but can definatly build the frame in that size area.

I just followed the book really, easy enough as I'd never done anything like this before.

I made the top frame of the chassis on the board, marked it with the positions of the uprights and temporarily braced it.

Then I made the bottom frame of the chassis on the board and tack welded the uprights. Then offered up the top frame, aligning the uprights with the marks previously made.

Then braced it all, added the rear section, the transmission tunnel, and then the brackets.

All of course while checking and double checking for accuracy and squareness at all stages and putting mechanicals in and out seemingly hundreds of times.

Was it worth it?

Not yet, but it will be.

I made the bottom clamped to the build table. For clamps I short pieces of2x2 wood and long wood screws that way I could clamp it everywhere. I had a bitch of a time getting the uprights from the bottom to the top frame so I mad two 90 deg brackets from the same 1 inch square tube and notched the outside corner so that a weld bead it was against would not interfere. Once this was done it was very easy to clamp the upright pieces perfectly at 90 degrees. Once the uprights were there puttting the topon was fairly easy.
Dale

I followed the book sequence of construction, no big issues or difficulties, (yet anyhow).
As for getting the uprights perpendicular and just for general holding / setting up, a pair of magnetic welding 'clamps' have been well worth the expense, about £16 IIRC

Mick

www.paulsimon8.freeserve.co.uk

an ammusing account of my chassis making