NEHA

I plan to follow Evan's lead and cage the Miata this winter. The cage design is well underway, mentally, but I don't yet own the tooling to cut, notch, bend, or weld tubing.

Any recommendations, advice, or leads on where to get serviceable and cost-effective fabrication tools would be greatly appreciated.

The grand plan is to do all the notching and bending and, once I confirm that Rich and I can get in and out, tack the cage together. A professional fabricator will weld all the safety critical joints. I'll just tack the cage and do little, non-safety-related stuff.

So, the big items on my shopping list (or long term borrow list) are:
tubing notcher
tubing bender (1.5" x 0.090")
TIG welder (60A maybe?)

Please make any recommendations you can about good tools, bad tools, sources, etc.

I've already grabbed John's Rota-Broach tip from Evan's topic. Any others?

Thanks.

Paul

I built mine a few years ago by myself. It's slightly different than what the current rules call for, but was built and approved before they came about. I probably only need another door bar and maybe an extra diagonal in the main hoop or halo, but anyway...I built it with pretty minimal tools.

I used a cheap bottle jack bender. It was like $300 or so. It's limited in that it can only do 90 degree bends max, and has a larger bend radius than expensive benders, but it works surprisingly well. I think it was from affordable bender.com or something. My cage is built with 1.5" .120" wall and it bent it great. Just have to plan around the limitations of the bend radius.

a tubing notch-er from speedway, or others, is an inexpensive and easy to use method for mitering your tubes. They adjust to angle, use a regular metal hole saw, have a strap clamp that holds the tube, and function just fine. I even use one at work on some basic tubing projects, it's fast and easy. Sure the rota broach method is nicer, but depends on what you have and budget. I even had/have? an old simple program that would make templates for mitering. You plug in angle, tubing diameter, etc and then you can print a squiggly line that wraps around the tube and show you where to attach it with an angle grinder.

welder...depends on budget. TIG machines are expensive, and from my experience with them cheap ones kind of suck. Poor duty cycle and not enough power to weld correctly. I'd probably go for a mig for the cage. You can get a nice mig, even one that runs on regular wall power, that will do the job without a huge investment (especially if you're only using .095" wall). I actually had a friend of mine do the final welding on my cage because his shop had a nicer welder, I was using a crap welder at home to just tack it all together (then crossed my fingers and drove it 60 miles to weld it).

Anyway, all comes down to budget. You can make a lot with little if you're patient. I much rather use nice tools, but we're talking about making 1 cage, not starting a fab shop, so I bet you can get away with some inexpensive stuff to make your goal happen. I was quite happy with my first attempt with minimal tools. Sure I could do better if given another chance, but I sure did learn a lot. I'd put the biggest investment into the welder...then bender...then notcher, in that order.

keep in mind that this advice comes from a do it my damn self guy who has had to get by with a mixed bag of junk tools for years and is just starting to get some decent stuff, for what it's worth.

A better idea than a cage.

http://exomotive.com/exocet/

http://www.jd2.com/p-32-model-3-bender.aspx
my friend has this and it works fantastic

I have been trained on both TIG and MIG at the Lincoln Electric school. I came to dislike MIG there and I dont own a MIG. I have a pre-inverter era Lincoln 175 Amp TIG.

One recommendation. If you plan to do the finish work with a TIG, then tack it with a TIG. Tacking it with a MIG leaves contamination behind that is very hard to clean completely away prior to TIG welding. The TIG will heat the residual contamination along with the base metal as it creates the weld puddle and that can cause a lot of undesirable things like welds that resemble a souffle or blowouts when the contamination suddenly vaporizes. I have TIG welded over MIG work but its a crap shoot as to whether it it comes out clean or not.

I agree that a cheap TIG welder is just a PITA to use. It can make an experienced welder feel like a beginner and a beginner look like he should find another hobby other than messing up perfectly good steel. That is because TIG welding takes training and practice to get it right and a poor tool only slows down the learning curve. Cheap MIGs arent that great compared to a good one either, but they are easier to for a novice to get to something that looks like a weld than a cheap TIG.

The JD squared/ Hughes Engineering bender (original company split up - viturally identical machines) are great - probably the best for all but the seasoned pro. Kevin G. has one of the Speedway Motors hydraulic jack/roller/die style, and you can do nice work with it as well.

I bought the Linclon 220 v. portable MIG from Wacky Willy's estate, and it's nice - It'll do 3/8" material in 1 pass with reasonable joint prep. I will NEVER be a good welder, for a coupla reasons - but with good equipment, an auto-dark helmet and proper fit-up, I can produce a decent weld downhand, and OK vertically. Willy really set the standard, for GOOD, full penatration MIG welds - when I cut some of his stuff up after my last wreck, there were fillets on the inside of the tube joins... and the fillet on the outside was like a good TIG or arc weld. The snazzy orange Golf in the For Sale section is jam-packed with BAD examples of MIG welding - poor penetration, weld piled on with incomplete fusion, piles of buzzard shit, resulting from trying to fill gaps over dirt/grease'paint/shmutz. And the seat brackets - OY! One end goobered onto the floor, the other end "lap" welded to the cage, sort of......

Willy always made me prep joins to not only fit, but be clean, shiny, and DRY - free of all oil! Oil, in a MIG or TIG weld, causes hard spots, because it provides a source of carbon. And, ya know what? when everything is real nice, it does'nt spatter much at all.

Try to get a portable bandsaw - like a Milwaulkee Porta-Band - to cut and fit tubing with. It's much smoother and more controllable than a sawzall - I got so I could make good fishmouths with it, and contour saw rectangular tubing to a scribe line ( like for a housing brace or subframe connector).

You're gonna want a small angle grinder for all kinds of stuff - get some "depressed center cutting wheels" aka "pipefitters wheels" - they let you cut welds and small sections, and generally clean up and hide evidence of previous crimes. Get some of the flexible grinding discs, and the rubber support thingie - makes achieving clean and shiny a lot easier.

Harbor Freight has stores now - I saw one in Salem, NH, and i've been in the one in West Springfield, MA.
Oh, yeah - A&A, the masters of the tab, bracket, and gusset universe - (yes, they have tacos!) is running a 25% off sale on Cyber Monday.

I have a nice small air over hydraulic bender (can just set it on the bench-don't neet to bolt to the floor)-and the notcher from Speedway that Jay O. mentioned. If you know when you plan on doing the cage, you can borrow them. ( I only have one bending job I know of this winter).

We do all our bending with a hydraulic jack style bender from Kraze Korlacki Speed Equipment in Seekonk, MA (EDIT: Uncle Brian corrected me, ours is not from harbor freight). The bottle jack has been replaced a couple times, but mechanically it is great. For notching, we use one of these from Norther Tool:


As for tubing... You may want to consider using 1-3/4 instead of 1-1/2 tubing. While the rules say your car only needs 1-1/2 because of its weight, that could change in the future. Plus the weight difference is very minimal for the added safety. Figuring 80 ft (no way you'll use that much for the miata), the difference is ~35 lb

IMHO, the "bow 'n arrow" style benders tend to crush or kink lighter wall tubing. The JDsq. bender will do .049 wall with no problem, CREW or DOM, and the Speedway Motors die 'n roller bender will do .062 well, can probably do the lighter stuff.
Also, watch sizes on anything to do with pipe, as pipe sizes are nominal - literally based on what they could make for inside diameters 100+ years ago. 1 1/4 pipe is really just over 1 5/8" in diameter (why drag cars have 1 5/8 x.134 as an alternate size to 1 3/4 x .120) - and some of the cheap benders, or the nice old greenlee conduit benders, have dies sized for pipe, not tubing.

Consider, as well, a really good cage kit. CSC Racing in Canada has been doing these for a long time, and they do a lot more than the stock cars they are known for. Miatas are prominently mentioned - if nothing else, they are a good place for ideas! https://www.cscracing.com/roll-cage-kits