Hey all, I wanted to start a single thread sharing my experiences along the way in building a family cage for my EB. I'll continue to update this thread with progress as I have it. Hopefully some find this thread useful as they plan their own cage build or are on the fence about doing it themselves. I'm no expert or professional fabricator; just your average enthusiast with a mechanical inclination and enjoy working on projects...
I started off with the need for roll-over protection. That then expanded into the need for secure 3pt seatbelt mounting (front & rear seats), which then expanded into the need for seat bracket and mounting support. The answer was a complete cage design that could accommodate a floor structure needed to integrate the seat mounts and to serve as the seatbelt anchoring points.
The challenge with these requirements is that none of the pre-fabricated or even weld-together cage kits currently available through the vendors were complete enough to meet my needs. When you take into account the floor structure, every seat and mount are different, therefore if I were to select a weld-in kit it would only get me about 60% of the way and I would still need to modify it accordingly. This drove me down the custom path...
I shopped around a few fabricators and settled on 2 potential local shops to build my cage. One high-end (aka race-car builders) and the 2nd more of an offroad shop who builds an occasional cage. I drew up some designs, assembled my requirements, and worked with each shop for estimates. In short, both shops came in about the same. They estimated roughly 30-40hrs of labor at approximately $100 bucks per hour. That's excluding materials.
While cost alone is not the driver behind my cage design; for that amount of money I could:
I started off with the need for roll-over protection. That then expanded into the need for secure 3pt seatbelt mounting (front & rear seats), which then expanded into the need for seat bracket and mounting support. The answer was a complete cage design that could accommodate a floor structure needed to integrate the seat mounts and to serve as the seatbelt anchoring points.
The challenge with these requirements is that none of the pre-fabricated or even weld-together cage kits currently available through the vendors were complete enough to meet my needs. When you take into account the floor structure, every seat and mount are different, therefore if I were to select a weld-in kit it would only get me about 60% of the way and I would still need to modify it accordingly. This drove me down the custom path...
I shopped around a few fabricators and settled on 2 potential local shops to build my cage. One high-end (aka race-car builders) and the 2nd more of an offroad shop who builds an occasional cage. I drew up some designs, assembled my requirements, and worked with each shop for estimates. In short, both shops came in about the same. They estimated roughly 30-40hrs of labor at approximately $100 bucks per hour. That's excluding materials.
While cost alone is not the driver behind my cage design; for that amount of money I could:
- Invest in all the tools needed to do it myself, and expand my tool arsenal in the process.
- Buy all the materials myself from local steel suppliers
- Build the entire cage myself, have a great learning experience, and still come in cheaper then having a pro do it.
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