I plan on taking some of your advice on bracing my chassis up, my question is will one inch OD tubing that is thicker than 1/8"(cant remeber exactly how thick but its thicker than1/8") be sufficiant i have about 15 feet of it left over from a bar stool racer project laying around. I plan on bracing the A pillar tube and behind my head with an "x" and some on my engine cage. Mite do from the cross bar where the steering wheel is bolted up to the front and any where else that mite need it. Where are some of the week point in the frames. Also how much weight is too much for a 1641 with a stock car transaxle?

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I may not know alot about working on cars, but I know enough to be dangerous.

Tater.. I have never seen anyone use 1 inch tubing for X bracing. Most everyone will use 1.5 inch tubing.

ANY additional bracing is better than no bracing but chassis support is not the area I would look to save money.

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Stiffness is usually the issue, not strength, so larger diameter, thin wall tubing would be a better choice than 1" dia, thick wall.

More importantly, it depends WHERE you are putting the bracing, as there's a whole lot of buggys out there with tubes with random bends in where they could be straight, or tubes dead ending in the middle of another tube rather than at a node. May look pretty, but it's useless in a crash.

1 1/2 , 1.20 wall is what I use. I have done 1in if space is limited but it's pretty thick. I can't post pics but look at jesses new buggy, or Greg Atkins BOTM pics. That's ab the best way to do it. Jesse posted some pics in one of your original post of bubbas blue fugitive we done at the shop. With 1in and 1 1/2

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IF YA CAN'T RUN WITH IT....RUN FROM IT

Someone please elaborate on this. This is great stuff. I wanna know more! lol

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always use 1 inch and a half with 120 wall and very important to put one on each side where you go in and out the uggy like matt said check mine out i posted picks for you in your old post

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I DO NOT FREE BASE COCAINE

my old buggy was x braced with 1" schedule 80 iron pipe behind the seats and i flipped it backwards off a wall and it didnt bent.. not even a tweak but it KO'd all the .120 wall in the front along with the beam, arms, splindles, tie rod etc...

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LEGALIZE BLUEGRASS!!!

Save a tree... eat a Beaver

That was about a 15ft drop to the roof Reno did

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IF YA CAN'T RUN WITH IT....RUN FROM IT

my 1 seater has 1 1/4" .095" x-brace and my old orange 2 seater had 1" .095" x-brace

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Just Stand On It!!!!

Chris

Your x-brace can be thin wall along with most of your "inside" bracing. if a tree or rock can hit it, I would go .095 wall. most of my bracing is .065 or .083 wall.

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Maybe you should chug on over to mamby pamby land....

A tubular frame is only strong if it's made up of triangles, and it's only stiff if the tubes are straight with no bends/kinks, even a 10% bend/kink in a tube will halve the stiffness or worse...

It might feel strong in your hand, but if your frame is full of bends half way down tubes and the sections are all squares or parallelograms, then it'll fold up like a paper bag along the weld lines the first time it takes a proper hit. As for nodes - it's pretty easy, all tubes should end at a node where other tubes are either ending or have a ~90* bend in them, a tube that meets another tube halfway down it's length is useless, as it'll just flex and bend the second tube like a twig when it's transmitting loads/impacts.

Excellent. So basically when you add a brace you have to continue it till it hits another at an acute angle of some sort. That's the part that gets weird in my head. I see many points where a tube intersects another half way-or-so down the 2nd's length. Is it just bad when this happens at an angle close to 90 degrees? Or you always have to have one on the opposite side passing the load on down the line? I know it's not rocket science but it seems like things could get rediculously heavy fast.

On second thought I'll just keep trying to picture triangles then I won't get so distracted.lol

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No, you've got a lot less redundant tubing, it should be stiffer and lighter...,.