auxilary Posted December 6, 2004 Share Posted December 6, 2004 Well, after all said and done, John Coffey's comment made over a year ago is about to be put into effect. I need to notch out my passenger side frame rail about 3" in length, and about 1.5 " deep at most for header clearance, I assume it's safe to just cut out the portion, and weld in a 14 or 16ga steel plate to fill in the holes and reinforce the weakness I'll create by cutting a section out? Any specific tips/hints/tricks? There is clearance...but very very little. If the motor rocks side to side (it is on solid mounts) it will hit the rail. I can try tilting it a little bit, but I don't want to tilt the oilpan too much. Frame rail notching is sort of last resort, but I'd like to get all opinions on this prior to doing any cutting. Any severe cons ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
johnc Posted December 6, 2004 Share Posted December 6, 2004 Fill the notched area wth 16ga and then overlap additional 16ga sheet about 4" past the notch fore and aft on all 4 sides of the notch. Basically reinforce the whole nothced area (plus an additional 4" before and after) with 16ga. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
auxilary Posted December 6, 2004 Author Share Posted December 6, 2004 got it, thanks! anything else I should watch out for? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dan Juday Posted December 7, 2004 Share Posted December 7, 2004 We notched both frame rails on the Tomahawk to make clearance for the sidepipes. Obviously you want to be very careful to completely support both sides of the area to be notched before cutting. We had the car up on eight jack stands. we shimed each one and banged on them to estimate the load each one had. Only untill we were pretty damn sure the jacks were equally supporting the weight of the car did we cut. We used 3/16" mild steel plate and , like John said, our reinforcement pieces spanned about four inches past the notch both for and aft. We used a section of 3" steel pipe cut in half to fill in our notch. Welded those in then ground and fitted the reinforcement pieces on each side of each rail and welded them in too. These pieces took a while to fit. We wanted the notched area to be completely supported from the top of the frame rails to the bottom. Came out very strong. At least as strong as before. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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