Seth wrote:The new buggy looks nice. As soon as I saw it I thought of yours. That's a very nice design you make. This new will have a few more ponies turning those wheels then your current one. However, I know its not necessary having driven yours. That crawl ratio was real nice.
I think most people think buggies all look the same (there's really only so many ways to attach tubes).....this one is a lot different than mine in terms of proportions and weight.
My nose section is 43", the 'cab' (for lack of a better word)...or passenger area is 50" and the rear section is 45" long.
The new chassis is 52" long in the nose, 40" in the cab, and ~43" in the rear. My chassis is 50" wide at the widest point, this one is 48". I would have designed it to be a little more proportional and made the cab larger (it's hard to get in and out).....but I was limited by how the A&B pillars were laid out. As I said, long story, but this chassis started out as a Campbell Enterprises chassis built on a 6" tall shortened fullsize blazer frame. The original design had a lot of promise when my friend showed it to me and I originally thought we'd just keep most of it. As it progressed though, we ended up cutting more and more off....now, the only things that are still original are the A, B and half the C pillar....but that dictated the cab portion.
I used a heavy 2x3x.188 wall rectangular tube for my lower frame....I used 1.75x.120" wall DOM for the frame on this buggy....which will save a bunch of weight. My buggy with the 4 banger is 3600 lbs.....I'm betting with the aluminum V8, his buggy will be 33-3400 lbs.
I'll try and remember to post up more pics when I get the engine cage done. The rear of the chassis is more filled in than it was in this set of pictures, and the front 'eye sockets' for the headlights were lifted and curved to look more like eye sockets....so it's already a little tweaked from what you see here.
Anyway, talk to you soon.
Sean