The final stretch: firing up our HTP welder and adding the last gussets to the cage.
See, more welding.
Time to celebrate our achievements. After scuffing down the bare metal cage, we hit it with some Eastwood Extreme Chassis Black, a heavy-duty black paint. It goes on easily and dries nicely with no runs, drips or errors.
Sure, it’s designed for the underside of the car, but it works well on the top, too.
Our cage is welded together and painted. Next, there’s a dash to reinstall.
It sounds so easy: Install a roll cage inside a Miata. While the prebent, precut cage fit very nicely inside our Sunshine Yellow 1992 Mazda Miata, we had a lot of welding to do with our HTP welder. A lot.
Fortunately, we were on the home stretch. The feet were welded to the car, and the major tubes had been tied together. Tonight’s project would be the final details—mainly adding a few gussets.
Then we could celebrate—or, more specifically, paint the cage. We decided to use Eastwood’s Extreme Chassis Black, a tough spray coating that, as you probably guessed, is black in color.
While the correct way to paint a cage probably includes lots of paper and masking tape, we found that some cardboard and a careful hand delivered results that were well within the spirit of ChumpCar racing.
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