very, very nice.. they look good... and I'm sure they drove ya a bit batty making em!
If the word "batty" is the same thing as kicked my a$$ for a while, then yeah, it drove me batty..
I made two bends last week. The first was a 90 and then I went strait for the drivers side a pillar. I started from the bottom and made it all the way up to the top of the windshield frame and it looked good. I then had 3+' sticking up into the rafters. Well, after a couple of beers with my friend that night, we decided that the top bend looked like it needed to go towards the beer fridge by about nine inches. A lot of math used that night..
Bent it the next morning and had the top rail pointing at the beer fridge. Yep, it was time to sit down and think about all of this again. I didn't touch another piece until this past Saturday. The one thing that I figured out is it is all on the same plane, if you will.
Couple of pics to show what I'm talking about for the next guy.
You can see in this pic that all is out of whack. Once I brought it in strait (from the beer fridge) things were not going to work out.
Saturday, when I bent these up again I started from the top and worked my way down. You can see from the pic of the two on top each other that everything is on the same plane except the bottom bend in of 10 degrees. I actually took mine to 12 degrees to give me a little more room between the bottom tube and the kick panel. Should give me a little more room to weld the tube to the center of the plate, instead of tight to one side.
Here is another thing that I did so I could have a better mental picture of the bends. I ended up snapping a couple of lines on the tube with the chalk line and shot some clear over them. It didn't do me much good, but was kinda neat to see the lines and how they flowed on the A pillars once in.
Awesome. Looks like you could use some help holding the tube up so you wouldn't need the tape and wire lol
Need more friends.
Mike, what are your plans for where the dash used to bolt to the inner A pillar? Just trying to visualize this and get some ideas for when I do mine.
Still working on this. I really want the dash to be able to come out if for some reason, I want to take the cage out.
looking good, are you welding to the A pillars?
The plan is to actually have two of them. One at the top portion of the dash and one lower. I some how want to incorporate these into the dash, Kinda like BigBlock72 did. I think that having two will be nice when I fabricate something to hold in an after market heater too.
Running into a small problem with my idea though. The top dash bar can't go to the top because of the A pillar bends. It would sit too far out and the dash wouldn't fit. I cut this tube a little long to start to give me an idea on how to make it work. I might give a slight bend on each end so the main body of the tube would sit closer to the firewall.
Wait a minute, no pics of the bender mounted in?? WTF!!!
Here is the bender all mounted up. I went with the Swag Offroad mount and it worked awesome.
lol
Looks great! Don't forget the tassels.....
Pinwheels FTMFW!!!!
When I did my B pillar, all came out great, though, now that I look at it closer, I think that I want them to be a little tighter to the bedrails.
If I do, I think that I could use this tube again for the back, something like this.
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