Chassis Reinforcement

(I'm not going to talk about the roll bar here, as it has its own page.)

Since the car was more than 30 years old, not particularly well known for being rigid, and going to be put under some extreme stress on track, I knew it was going to need some work. Primarily, it would need a rollbar, which would help tremendously in this area, but I also wanted to do a little more where I could.
One day, I was underneath the car and noticed that the driver side looked like it had a "frame rail" and the passenger side didn't. The rails on these cars are more like a reinforced area on the floor pan than an actual beam of metal like you will find on truck and today's modern cars. I investigated a little further and determined that the passenger floorpan had already been "repaired", by welding in a thick peice of sheetmetal where the metal was rotting out.

I ordered a full set of frame rails from Bad Dog Parts and at the same time got some reinforcement plates for my sway bars, to help endure the stress from driving on track with beefier suspension parts. Both Pete and Quality Welding (see below) commented on the great quality of the Bad Dog peices and they fit perfectly.

While the car was at Piper Motorsports, I had them install the reinforcement plates for the sway bars. It was a simple, easy task for them and they not only welded them in place, but also painted them while they were fresh to prevent any corrosion from setting in. They also fabricated a roll bar for the car, click here for details on that.

A little over a week later, I met with my buddy Pete with the intent on getting some new metal in for the old rusty floorboards. I bought a set of MSA floor pans and had them within the week; pretty good considering they had to cross the U.S. and I didn't pay for rush shipping. Over the weekend, we cut out the entire floorboard and tacked in the new one (after making some slight fitment modifications), one side at a time. The new rails came with frame rails on them, however I removed these because I already planned on using the beefier Bad Dog rails. There was some additional work necessary on my car before putting the rails on which neither Pete nor I felt comfortable with, so we stopped at that point and decided I would have to take the car to have a shop finish this job.

I got in touch with Quality Welding in Charlottesville, VA, who have done several metal-working jobs for me in the past, and they said they could help me out. After I removed the new rails and prepped the areas on the car that they would be working on, I dropped the car off for them to work their magic. While it was there, I asked them to also install a peice of 1"x1" square tubing along the rocker on each side, which will serve as a place for me to put my jack and jackstands in the future so that I don't cobble up my new frame rails.

After these projects were finished, I primed and painted the interior to go along with my original paint project, using the dark grey from a 350z. On the undercarriage, I trimmed off the pieces of metal overlap from the install of the floor pans and then applied seam sealer to all the new seams as well as the joints of the jack bar. Once all the seam sealer had set, I used a wirebrush on my angle grinder to get all the surface rust off and clean the metal. After priming, I sprayed two coats of Rubberized Undercoating (3M part#08883) to provide a durable outer coating. Since I still have another can, I will apply several more coats on the jack bar and probably another coat on the undercarriage to make sure it is built up and has sealed any miniscule gaps.

Scope out the pictures below for a progression of how the car shaped up as we added all of these components.