home fabricators take notes, there is a wealth of education in these pics for sure. granted we rock crawlers wont be doing 140 through the desert but the quality of your rig and you surviveing a serious crash or roll over, posibily miltiple times depends on how well you build it.
look at the welds, the stacked coin method you here people decribe is actually a weaker weld unless the overlap of the weld pool (each dab of filler rod) overlaps the previous weld pool by atleast 80 to 90 %. I see welds here on ck5 all the time where the weld is only overlaped by as little as 40 to 60% of the previous weld pool. you end up with this wide/narrow effect which is a weaker weld. you see in these pics their welds are consistantly the same width the entire length of the weld.
even a mig weld should be this consistancy too. guys that mig weld that do this type of method of welding do the same thing, too big of seperation in the weld pause.
you also see where everywhere there is a bolt the contact point of the bolt head and nut is double walled to eleminate pull through and add rigidity and strength to the structure. all most all the gussets are of tube rather then a plate type gusset on the center of the tube so in a wreck you wont get a narrow gusset actually punching through a tube. a single plate type gusset only contacting one wall of a given piece of tube is weaker then a tube gusset which uses the full width and structure of a tube.
some joints have the tube with a bend radius in the tube right at the point of contact of the ajoining tube instead of just a straight line into the ajoining tube with the end coped. this gives a bigger surface area of contact and more weld in the weld joint, hence a stronger joint.
every bolt is in a double sheer situation not single shear, again much stronger.
Im not saying build your rig like a trophy truck at all Im just saying look at the pics, there is a lot you can learn from them about structural integrity and design for sure. there is a reason why that truck was built like it was. it was not built like that from day one in racing, there built with this extreme type of construction because they evolved over time and FAILURE and probably some or alot of trial and error to become as reliable and indestructable as they can be considering there intended racing environment.
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