Family Cage Help

[GSP9]

I have a San Felipe roll cage and recently bought the rear weld in family cage kit since I have kids. I mocked up the kit and the rear bar sat too high and would have interfered with the hardtop. It also had too much forward rake but I tackled the height issue first. I assumed there would be some fabrication involved so I was okay with that. Anyways, I have it just about where I want it (height wise) but the rear bar still has way too much forward rake with the included top braces. The top of the rear brace just sits too far forward. The top braces that connect the new and old bar that came with the kit are roughly 32" long of 2" od roll bar material. I need those top bars to be about 36" and that would still give the rear bar only a little forward rake which I think it needs. The local welding shop could order me 2" roll bar material but I would have to buy a 20 foot section and it would cost me over $100 before shipping and he thought the shipping would be pretty salty. Any other suggestions on where to get roll bar material? Or even some type of material to make some sort of a coupler if I were to cut the existing pieces I have and somehow extend them with a coupler. Any thoughts?

 

[hyghlndr]

Where are you located? Any local steel shop should have it.

 

[SteveL]

It's made/sold in 20' lengths but they will cut the length the you need. It's usually a higher price per/ft and they may charge for the cut. Still cheaper than 20' in your case. The other good option is go to the metal warehouse and check the scap pile. They sell leftover cut pieces by weight for scrap price. Where were you a few moths ago? I just gave a bunch to a scrap guy. I got tired of watching it rust around here.

 

[GSP9]

I'm in central PA. I checked the yellow pages tonight and have a few prospects that I'll check out on my way into work tomorrow. Thanks.

 

[Rickmanmfg]

I just bought some metal for frame repair from MetalsDepot.com. It is expensive and it took over a week for them to process an ship it (I am still waiting to receive it). It was still cheaper than getting the 20-24' sticks from our local steel suppliers. Royce

 

[hyghlndr]

Central PA should be a pretty easy place to find tubing. Sometimes if you look on pirate4x4 under the regional section they have shop recommendations.

I am in Delaware but buy mine from "PA Steel", they have a few locations.

http://www.pasteel.com/locations

 

[Glass Pony]

Central PA should be a pretty easy place to find tubing. Sometimes if you look on pirate4x4 under the regional section they have shop recommendations.

I am in Delaware but buy mine from "PA Steel", they have a few locations.

http://www.pasteel.com/locations

I used Steel Liquidators when I lived up in Wilmington. For the Power Plant and the Bronco.
http://www.shopjfi.com/steelliq

 

[76YETI]

Was the original roll bar and family cage kit both purchased from Wild horses? I was going to buy the same and saw 5 reviews that said it fit perfectly. Your fitment seems way off?

 

[duffymahoney]

Here is my original roll bar with the san felipe family cage welded on

 

[gddyap]

I added the extension to my cage a few months ago. I'll measure how long the connectors are but I didn't change the length of them. They were just right for my soft top. I had to do some grinding of the ends of the hoop to fit the existing cage better.
onlinemetals.com has a 36" piece of 2" DOM for $31.81ea plus shipping.

 

[GSP9]

"Was the original roll bar and family cage kit both purchased from Wild horses? I was going to buy the same and saw 5 reviews that said it fit perfectly. Your fitment seems way off?"

Not sure where the original roll bar was from as a PO had that done but the new kit is from Wild Horses. Initially, everything went together really well with fitting up but when I stepped back to look at it from the side, the new rear bar sat two inches higher than the front bar and it just didn't look right at all. In fact, it most likely would have been touching the hardtop when it goes back on from my calculations. I could have shortened the top cross braces to allow for the rear bar to have more forward rake but again, that didn't look right either. Plus, it would have put the rear bar directly over your head and would have made for very little to no headroom.

So at that point I cut the rear bar down to get it even with the front bar, height wise. It still had to much forward rake so I reworked the angle of the rear bar slightly and got it to have a slight forward rake that would keep it behind a rear passengers head. But after doing all that, the top braces are now too short. Another way to think about it is I took almost 2 inches of material off the bottom of the rear bars, if I could add that to my top two cross braces, I think it would be perfect. I wish I would have taken a picture after the first mock up because it clearly wasn't proportioned right. Even after looking at all of the pictures online of family cages, this one was off. And that's not a knock on Wild Horses, it's possible that my original bar is slightly different than what they used as a template for their kit.

I checked out Metal Depot and Online Metals and they look like my best bet at this point.

 

[76YETI]

Thanks for the explanation and good luck! Also, thanks to the other posts

 

[GSP9]

Managed to find two pieces about an hour south of me at a small farm related welding and fabricating shop. So I rode down yesterday afternoon to pick them up so I can hopefully get this thing finished up this weekend. The guy was really nice and knew that it's pretty tough to find locally and sold it to me for what he paid for it. So I ended up walking away with two 5 foot pieces for $40.