Collision safety in our cars

[Ol'fogasaurus]

Correct! But in some states the Parking Brake rule doesn't apply (I checked up in a couple states but that was several years ago, and that rule may have been changed also).

Lee

[Ol'fogasaurus]

It is interesting and frustrating (to your "taking a break"/or is it "taking a brake"?) thing you are frustrated with.

"Things" and their limitations can be or are very frustrating. There is not limitation that I know of where a parking brake is not allowed. My blue buggy came with a non-mechanical parking brake setup: the rear brakes had a "push button" setup in the main brake line from the master cylinder to the divider to each of the rear brakes. Did it work... ee-yeaaaaah ( ) but it also failed if the button (which ended up doing body dam(n)age to the buggy) was not set properly or there was an air or brake fluid leak at one of the joins allowing the breaks line pressure to fail.

!cid_B6C93EBC-BC75-4D1E-AD33-78AA7BD55D46@home.jpg

DSC02270 - Copy (2).jpg

One of the reasons I brake either in flat sand or side-ways/parallel to the face of the hill on a hill so it doesn't roll down.

I also put the trans in 1st or reverse (usually reverse due to the lower gearing ratio). I don't know if it is still the law (on the street) but it was for a long time as we live in a hilly area. (addition to the original post)

The cage entrance and exit from the cage is another problem with exit to "do your business". It can take a bit of time to get in or bump into things allowing the e-brake to come loose.

Also (to be silly) you could carry an anchor to stop things but then if you are in very hard sand or in rocks then that doesn't work well either.

I am sure that there are other things people come up with but after sitting in meetings to fix thing even that can be very frustrating too.

Lee

I made a clarification on the sentence where I was talking about the hydraulic E-brake fluid failure. In this case the term E-brake really isn't a good term but, when it does work right... it works right or at least temporarily.

Lee

[oprn]

As far as I know there are no rules governing off road vehicles here because... I suppose... they are not on the road. On road vehicle must have a functioning parking brake to pass a safety inspection. That braking system has to have a completely different activation system than the normal brakes.

On my sand rail I put a ball valve in the rear brake line. That worked but would bleed down on it's own over time. Nothing you could walk away from for any extended period and trust.

[oprn]

Back to the subject of this thread, having once again driven this street Buggy for a week and a half straight on holiday, the need to stiffen this body is glaringly obvious. It flexes badly on uneven roads. More bolts between the pan and body and the fenders and hood would be a start but some additional structure would be better. The trick for me is to find a compromise between the trending jailhouse look and the old school rat trap bar. I want to keep the structure mostly hidden and again, roll over protection is not the priority, side protection and torsional stiffening improvement is.

[Ol'fogasaurus]

IMG_0288 copy.jpg

This is a body lift I built; I've made 2 of them now. The commercial body lifts by themselves are not strong enough as I think they are designed for looks when between the pan and the body.

Takes time to do but if you can weld it isn't that hard.

The aftermarket floor pans come in 2 thicknesses... get the thicker ones!

A cage with a front hoop, a rear hoop, fore and aft side bars, a bar between the front hoop and the same but located differently than the front and attached to the body lift is going to help with strength a lot.

See if you can find my black buggy build as it has a lot of other information as how to build a pan mount that you can rotate while doing the rebuild. https://www.shoptalkforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=113703

Lee

[oprn]

I fully understand the advantage of the body lift for stiffness and if this were an off road Buggy, that is exactly what I would do but it is not. As a street Buggy the lifted look is not what I want and a higher C of G is counter productive to good cornering. I am considering something similar, rectangular tubing in the same shape as the pan edge but bolted to the outside of the lower body edge right at pan height. That would form the base to weld some uprights and angle bracing and upper tube under the body lip for side protection and tie into a dash cross tube and a cross tube between the rear shock towers. This all should go a ways in stiffening up, boxing in, the center section of the "tub" body.

The rear cross tube could then be used as an upper support for a Kiefer style support for the frame horns and an anchor point for rear seat lap belts. There are no rear seat belts at the moment and I have not added them yet because they would only be bolted to the glass shell.

With that structure in place I would then consider a single old school roll hoop for nostalgic looks only but it would have to be braced back to the rear shock towers to help limit to some degree the "rat trap" effect. I will not do a full roll cage on this car, I am trying to preserve the original "Beach Buggy" theme here. A full cage in my mind destroys that nostalgic look (strictly personal opinion) not unlike the addition of a full cage would destroy the looks of a T bucket roadster or a Cadillac Coupe Deville convertible...

Again if this were an off road Buggy the conversation and build direction would be completely different. I like the full cage security of my off road sand rail.

[Ol'fogasaurus]

001.JPG

This is another way of doing some reinforcement of the pan. This is 1" square tube but it is connected to the 1 X 3 body lift via the body mount area in the pan halves. You could do a 1 X 2 body lift which would show only about 1" (sorry about non-metric dimensions) but still give the pans body mount flanges some additional strength supporting both the body and pan together. Not the strongest way but better than nothing.

I used the rotisserie (that I made) to put the floors on then, using "Kerfing"/"pie cuts" to form the bends ("Kerfing" is a wood working term similar to the pie cutting method in metal. I didn't know it was a wood working term until lately).

Using a "hoop" (for looks) is very dangerous as if there is a roll over, they want to lay flat or deform. One of my friends built a buggy for a kid using a hoop and the kid rolled it almost the first time out and died. It doesn't take much to make the short wheelbase, and the body sitting higher with the stock spring/torsion bars. I would suspect that a moderately cross bar and diagonal bars mounted to the hoop in the area of the cross bar would help some but you still have that upper part to deal with.

Dune house diary 081 copy.jpg

My blue buggy came with a hoop (as I remember) but it didn't take me long to see what could happen very easily hence the cage. This is the buggy coming back from the cage build. Still street legal but the cage is covered up.

IMG_0563 (2).JPG

Lee

[oprn]

Oh I agree on the single hoop being a liability. The fellow I bought the Buggy from gave me a drawing with the dimensions of the original Manx supplied roll hoop. He was going to build and install one. I suppose I could form one for show out of a piece of PVC. In a roll over it might still get in the way but once again at the risk of sounding like a broken record, the risk of a rollover on the street is extremely low. In actual fact it may be even lower than the statistical average of 3% due to the Buggy being lowered, has lowered seating, is converted to IRS, has stiffer springing, has a wider track with sway bars front and rear. For all practical purposes a rollover is not really going to happen. A spin out? Yes absolutely! Roll? Not as long as it stays on road.

[Ol'fogasaurus]

A side hit, a rear end hit, hitting the curb, etc. all can cause side rolls or endows. One of the guys I worked with was into Bajas and coming around this same curve going into the parking lot he rolled the car in a fairly light wind. He replaced the Baja with another one and he did it again. His BAJAs had been built explicitly not to roll over.

Not trying to be bossy but I had seen this stuff on the street or in buggies I was looking at to buy, this was back in the 1960s.

Lee

[oprn]

No, I completely understand your point of view coming from the off road segment of motorsports where roll overs are part and parcel of that world. That is completely legitimate and roll over protection is paramount there. It's a world where vehicles are lifted, C of Gs are higher than normal, often still with a swing axle and it's inherent jacking tendencies, air time is normal, limits of adhesion are constantly being pushed on terrain that has ridges and boulders to catch tires on. Oh ya! It's roll over heaven for sure!

My challenge to you and anyone else interested in this subject is to break out of that off road mindset and consider the world of street driving and it's collision hazards. Look up the statistics, take a walk through an auto wreckers and count the front enders, rear enders, tee bones and roll overs. Educate yourself. Think about the "What if's" as you drive around. Now I am not saying "Don't build a roll cage!", not at all. Just think about our focus. Is it where it needs to be for street driving? Or are we fooling ourselves into a false sense of security and neglecting the real risks in traffic? I got "T" boned on a motorcycle once and now I am very conscious of my vulnerability from the side in our Buggy. That is one of the things I think about.

The reason I started this thread is because I have been giving this subject some serious thought, noticed where the focus presently is in our hobby and I think we could do much better for those of us in the on road kit car hobby. I don't have the answers, just an idea or two to toss around.

On the subject of ideas, I have not had a good opportunity to look at a Beetle Cabriolet floor pan. What did VW do to stiffen them up and are replacement Cabriolet stiffeners available that we could add to our Buggy floor pans? Could they help the fore/aft and torsional strength of our Buggies? Has anyone used a Cabriolet floor pan?

[Ol'fogasaurus]

Both the blue buggy and the black car was started to be a streetcar but that was many many years ago.

It is the blue car is where I learned a lot of things on the street that were both good and bad. A couple of them are the reasons why the blue buggy is now off-road only.

The black buggy is now part way into off-road mostly but not far from being able to be changed back into street usable; but for now, its just sitting there. This is due to mostly cage design (for street use mostly) but also, if I do go off-road, it more than likely could happen. Several years ago, I bought a truck that was new in design and was on the highway into another state. Another truck came up alongside of me and the guys in it were looking at the truck and drifted into the same lane (side by side) as I was in, and I almost ended up in the ditch (at 70 MPH) until I hit the "loud pedal" and got out of the situation.

If you found my build you would get into the one problem I have and that is with brakes and the problem with turning brakes which, now the state I live in, are not legal on a street vehicle (there is one place where it is allowed but not where I would go). I look at "buggy's for sale" or for parts and I have seen a lot of things and talked to people who lived through them... and some who were there at the time of destruction....

I am an old fart with my interest in playing with cars going back in the late 50's and early 60's. I have seen a lot of good and bad things come out in design. I also worked in engineering as a tech then working my way up to the limit in my schooling. There was a lot of tech discussions at my 7-foot-long desk with all kinds of mechanical, technical, structural and several other types of specialty engineers, so I think along those lines a lot of the time. It is interesting to hear things one never thinks of and the reasons for or against them and believe me there was a lot of jaw dropping. I took off running in one of the early ones at my desk thinking that there was going to be a "fist fight". My "supervisor" looked at me then the discussion calmed down when the engineer I was assigned to at the time talked to me.

Discussions from people from different countries as well as people from all over the "states" it is interesting to hear the use of words have different meaning and uses and add to that tone, body languages yelling . and then add to that a few apologies afterwards but it was necessary most of the time.

I also checked other's work and signed off on the drawings and I did final sign offs on them after all the other signatures were added. Because of the discussions where I was there but often standing on the top side of the desk, I learned how to print notes upside down and backwards on the "check print": for capturing what was required after arguments and discussions were over.

Your thread/planning is a good idea to get started with and asking questions is also a good idea. I do not know everything but giving ideas or thoughts to help others is why I post.

One of the things though, which is common, it to limit thoughts to a linear direction and not think of the things that could or shouldn't happen and which also usually does happen. Street use covers a lot bigger ground (no pun intended) than the different off-road potential things. I have seen "street" things happen off-road or entrance trails turned into blind jumps and landing from over 10-foot high. I also have seen off-road stuff done on the street which is where a lot of parts come from. We, and not just in the "states" are going through some really dangerous things on the street. Some of them were being done when I was younger but more aggressive and thought unlimited as they were back then.

What "can't happen" can happen I am sorry to say.

Lee

[Ol'fogasaurus]

One other thing is that the body's FG material on the black buggy setup is a thinner/different material and I think (but not positive) a lot of it is sprayed in place. It feels fairly stiff but in some areas it feels weak. That is one of the reasons I put the 1" square tube in the mounting tunnel in the floor of the pan for the additional support. I got through welding into the floor mounting tunnel's material and almost immediately felt that I should have gone with the other feeling on using 1 X 2 rectangular tube rather than the 1" square thick-walled tube. The center if the tube has the radiuses to deal with brought on by the thicker material. Each in of the inner radius needs some area between the end and the hole for the fastener otherwise the tube is weakened. A lot of thing one doesn't think about unless the subject comes up. This is stuff I had to deal with at my job, both the drawing of it (design) or checking other's work looking for stuff like this.

There are also some other things I need to do but not sure just how to accomplish them. It is the front fender support like the early "flying" fenders had and also adding supports to the running boards as anyone getting in the buggy is likely to step up on the running boards. This is the same for street and off-road. Is it FG or metal to use and how to shape and support it.

As hard as it is to do engine and trans things, they can be teeny compared to other things needed in a buggy setup.

Looking cool is one thing but looking strong and cool is another thing especially if something fails.

Lee

[oprn]

Yes, I agree that street use does cover a larger range of potential collision hazards which is why I am attempting to broaden the conversation. I also agree that the quality and strength of our fiberglass car bodies vary widely. There was no laws in place for that sort of thing back in those days. Collision protection regulation came later. I suspect in the modern regulation environment our cars may not even be legal to market if they were to be produced today. I do know it is getting tougher all the time to insure and register them.

[Ol'fogasaurus]

I am not sure about what other countries do or require but here in the "states" the feds have minimum requirements and then each state has their own requirements as well as towns do also.

"Cause and effect" are constantly being changed, sometimes for the good and other times for what was thought to be good.

It's a rough life isn't it. No sooner than getting something brand new then the rules change everywhere and away we go from there.

Lee

[oprn]

In answer to my question about what VW did to stiffen up the Beetle Cabriolet floor pan, is seems... nothing. The extra strength was built into the heater channels. I did not know that!

Here is a thread that deals with strengthening that area. Much the same as you were suggesting Ol'fogasaurus. https://www.thesamba.com/vw/forum/viewt ... p?t=696171