THE INTERIOR - Part 7

Becca's Office Space!

Once the chassis was done, it was time to fine-tune the interior and again, we started with the seats.  The MasterCraft 3G seats are hands-down the safest seats in the sport and our decision to use them brought comfort and safety to Becca, but some careful measuring and an interesting layout by the Blue Torch Fab crew.  From the mockup chassis, they already knew the approximate seat location. Since the Lovell transfercase and the tranny mounts had not yet been installed, we were not sure of the exact mounting.

Bender, using Dallas (who's 2" taller than Becca) as a test-dummy, figured out the location that put the seat as low as possible and at the same time give Becca the foot-room needed. Notice he's using a level as there are no cross-bars currently running from the left to right of the chassis to judge level from.

After putting the seats in place, the crossbars were built into the chassis as combination cross-members and seat supports.

Then, it was decided that the seats could be lowered even more by cutting the bottom rails off the MasterCraft seats.  We DO NOT recommend that you do this as true suspension seats are designed to be installed a certain way.  As we are knowledgeable about their install parameters, we knew we would still have enough "flex room" (4") beneath the seats.   Our mounting plans made the factory mount impractical in this vehicle so we had to cut the bottom rails/mounts off and build our own mounts.   Sorry Robbie... :-)  Again...don't be stupid and cut yours off just because we did...we've got a very special floor layout that makes this possible...most vehicles would not be able to do this without endangering the occupants.

While the seat covers are off, take a close look at the quality of the seat build, as well as the technology in these MasterCrafts.  It's not just a square of canvas held to a seat frame with some string...there's a number of special layers, strapping, and cords suspending these seats to offer a comfortable and safe ride, while lasting far longer than most of the other brands of seats out there.

With the base rails cut off, Bender and Matt went to work designing tabs to mount the seats with.  Though we don't show it here, the rear tabs we built had additional gusseting added later as I was not confident that the mounting would be strong enough over time with the stress these seats see.

The seats were then set in place and the chassis half of the mounts were designed on the computer, CNC Plasma cut, and welded in double shear.  Double shear might seem like overkill, but there's a method to our madness.  I asked to be able to use quick release pins in place of bolts to mount the seats.  Using double shear tabs, this is possible and the seats can be installed or removed in under one minute...that is something VERY nice when you've only got a few minutes between competition obstacles to make repairs.

Take a close look at those last two pics...the cross bars are running exactly perpendicular to the chassis.  Look at the mounting tabs...should the left and right mounts be the same then???  The answer?  Yes, they should be in a normal crawler...but the Red Bull RockHer II is anything but normal!  Yes, the seat is crooked...bigtime!  Actually, it's approx. 6 degrees crooked and that means Becca's body will be facing diagonally a bit.  This was done to enable her legs to be in the proper position to work the throttle and brake pedals properly and comfortably.  It will be little awkward at first, but after a few minutes, you don't notice it as you just turn your head to face forward.

I have experience with this as sometimes I actually start into an obstacle with my rear-steer already crooked.  If there's a ton of hard right turns where it looks like I'll need to do rear burns to try to slide the rear left while turning the front right, I'll set the rear steer as much as 10 degrees to the left, tell the judge BEFORE I START that I've got the rear steer crooked and it's supposed to be that way.  Then drive the course with the whole rig crooked.  It's funky at first, but easy enough to get used to.  To add to the story for clarification, if I go through the whole course without changing the rear steer position, even to straighten it, I am not assessed a rear steer penalty. If I straighten it or turn it further once I've started into the course, I get a deduction.

The next step took input from everyone and that was the fabrication of the engine cover (aka doghouse).  First a number of measurements were taken and everyone tried to get on the same page of how to design an engine cover that fit the rules as acting as a proper firewall.  In this situation, the doghouse needed to cover the back of the engine as well as the sides and the top forward to at least the center (front to back) of the engine block.  We erred on the safe side and went 2/3 of the way forward.  Bender pulled out his laser/level to mark the floor-line accurately.  Following the laser-line, he marked it with a sharpie.  More measurements were taken, and Matt made a clear and easy to follow diagram...of the inside of the pirate4x4.com web server...at least that was what his diagram looked like to me!

Matt took that doghouse diagram and somehow turned it into an accurate rendering and actually built it right into the computer rendering of the chassis.  This way, he was sure everything fit.

The computer then sent a "cut program" to the CNC Plasma torch and it started spitting out pieces of the big puzzle.  It was then bent on a sheet metal brake, assembled, tacked together, put inside the chassis to check the fit, and then taken out, finish welded, and sanded smooth.

At the same time, the floorboard was cut and put together, and then the finished doghouse installed with it.  The driver's side seat tab got in the way, so the doghouse was hand notched and reinstalled.

While all of this was going On, Dallas was inside going through all of the air plumbing that will power the ARBs and the Lovell air-shifted transfer-case. 

I guess I should clarify here if you haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere...the Lovell t-case actually has one clutch on the front output shaft and a second clutch on the rear output shaft.  We will use a PowerTank "JetPak" to supply the air power (regulated to 170 PSI) to two seperate toggles switches.  One switch then goes to the front t-case clutch, and the other switch to the rear t-case clutch. The air pressure supplied when those toggles are "open" engages the clutch plates and that gives power to the wheels.

Also, the RockHer II will have ARB Air Lockers front and rear so we need and another air supply regulated at 90psi, splitting off to two more switches, and then off to the proper differential to supply the ARB's with the pressure needed to engage them.

Considering there was to be a maze of plumbing and the more the plumbing, the more the possibility for trouble, we paid extra attention to be sure we had some redundancy built in.  The first was the worry that all of those parts running off of one bottle was risky.  Not that there will not be enough air in a single bottle to handle everything for a competition as there is plenty to run all of this for weeks if you don't have leaks...but that word "LEAK" is downright scary!  Steve Sasaki at PowerTank put us at ease by saying he had a special manifold that would accept two tanks.  If one were to run out of pressure, just quickly turn it off and turn the other on.  Great. That problem solved in a simple way!  But what about all of this plumbing???  To make the install clean and reliable, Dallas convinced me to use hard-line for almost every air-line on the chassis.  Hard-line for all of that means doing a TON of double-flares...AHHHHHHH!!!!!!  Double flares are the WORST if you must do more than one or two!!!!  That's when I decided I needed to buy Dallas a special gift which you'll see a little farther down this page :-)

After we had a diagram of how the plumbing would go, we headed off to NAPA to get some of the small inverted flare fittings and adapters, over a hundred feet of , and then picked up the phone to call PowerTank to get their "manual" ARB switches as we place far more trust in those, than we do the electric switches that are normally used to control the airflow to the lockers. We also ordered two air pressure gauges that would show us the pressure going to the witches for the ARBs and the switches going to the Lovell case.  Also, we called Russell Performance Plumbing to get their Stainless Braided ARB hose and adapters to go in place of the "blue line" that normally runs from the switches to the lockers.  Though we have only had one "blue line" failure over the many years (due to a breaking link arm taking it out), we've decided we'd better be safe than sorry and go with the far stronger option offered by Russell.

All of these parts would be installed into a custom switch panel built by "12 Volt Guy".  We also ordered our combination gauge / ignition panel from him as well as much of the electrical needed to handle getting the interior power where it needed to go.  I'll get to the rest of that in a bit but here a couple of shots to show the bunch of plumbing parts we were dealing with...remember, this is just for the air system...we'll get to brake plumbing further down in this segment of the story, and the engine plumbing will be soon be covered in "Build 5". Again, here's the air plumbing...50 feet of 3/16" hardline, hundreds of flare nuts and fittings, a number of valves, gauges, and switches. What you see here is about 1/2 of what we ended up using.

To start the plumbing, Dallas worked with the doghouse to find the location of the air switch panel supplied by 12 Volt Guy.  Dallas immediately figured out that with so much hard-line going to and from that panel, that if we ever needed to remove the doghouse, we'd have a problem if the switch panel was attached to the front.  Matt and Dallas worked on an idea to cut out a hole in the doghouse just less than the outside dimensions of the panel.  They then would put the panel behind the aluminum of the doghouse and the panel would show through the cutout.  Then, a frame (you can see it in Dallas' hand in the 1st pic below) would screw on top of it all and give it a finished look.

Now, if you want to remove the doghouse to access the engine, just unscrew the panel, unbolt the doghouse from the floor, and lift it off while the panel stays in place, held by the plumbing.  If you need to access the back of the switch panel for some reason, we'll have an access panel in the side of the doghouse later.  The switches in the panel above:  The two left switches run the Lovell T Case (top one is front).  The two right switches are for the ARB's (top is front).  The two black switches in the center bottom are the Warn Winches (top is front). The gauges are air pressure gauges that correspond to the air switches above them so we know what the pressure is at the Lovell and the ARB's as they are both different.

Next, Dallas started creating his own double-flare hard-lines.  The tool we bought him makes this a breeze!

First he cuts the line to length and sands it smooth with 220 sandpaper or a super-fine file.

Then he puts his flare tool in the vise and CRANKS it down tight...then puts the hard-line in the groove that holds the line tight, drops the top half of the groove clamp in place, flips the cap around, and screws the top handle down tight so the tube won't move while the flares are being pressed.

He then checks to see if the two-stage die is slid to the stage 1 position that will make the first half of the flare and pulls on the cam-lever to do the "funnel" shape of the tube end.  Then, he releases the cam-lever, slides the die sideways to the stage 2 position and pulls the cam-lever again to finish the inverted flare. Then, loosen and remove the cap and groove clamp top half and you're done.  He will sand the flare lightly with the 220 just to be sure there are no friction burrs...something you really should do to ensure a good seal.

Before putting the flare on the other end or doing any bending, he'll slide the tube nuts on...if you don't do it then, you'll have to start over.  Here's the back of the 12 Volt Guy panel after it's been pre-plumbed for installation.

Using the below pic as a "map" to understand the manifolds...The two Jet Paks screw onto the female fittings you see hanging downward.  You can turn one or both on...we'll just use one at a time and leave the other for backup.  The gauge on the top left tells you the pressure coming out of the bottle(s).  The adjustable regulator comes out of the top of that manifold and we'll use the gauge on the top right to set that regulator to approx 170 PSI.  The hard-line leaves that regulator and heads down to the lower "splitter" manifold...I guess the words "splitter" and "manifold" are redundant...?...oh well! The left line going downward out of the splitter goes straight to the Lovell switches still at 170 PSI.  The next brass and blue colored fitting hanging down is a secondary "barrel" regulator,  also supplied by PowerTank, and we further reduce the pressure there to 90 psi.  We know it is at 90 b looking at the gauge below the ARB switches on the doghouse switch panel.  From the barrel regulator it goes into a "T" and one leg goes to the ARB switches and the other leg goes to a 110 psi "pop-off" valve.  Sometimes, when you invert the CO2 bottles, some of the liquid CO2 gets past the regulator and into the lines.  It then expands very rapidly, raising the pressure beyond the limits of the ARB O-rings, so if that were to happen, the pop-off valve would open to release the extra pressure before any damage was done.  The other fittings you see on the splitter are plugs.  I am thinking we will "upsize the line between the two manifolds for more flow and put an "emergency" quick disconnect on there in case we ever need air for tires on the course.  A Jet Pak carries more than enough air for a single tire filling and the first bottle could be used to fill the tire, then that bottle turned off and the second bottle turned on to run the Lovell and ARBs.  I'll consider it but it's something for later.

Now many people use a number of specialty bending tools to make their tube bend a certain way...Dallas uses a different technique he picked up working on Shelby Cobras in one of the most reputable Shelby Restoration shops in the country...he bends with his hands and a chunk of the proper diameter tube for the bend radius he wants.  He says he ONLY does this with 3/16 as anything bigger flattens and distorts.   You saw the spools of tube in the pic above that he starts with.  First he needs to take the long radius from the "spooling" out and he does that by firmly (not harshly) hitting it with a dead-blow on a solid / flat surface then simply holds steady pressure on the tube and rolls it slowly over the chassis tube of the proper OD (Outside Diameter) until it reaches the bend he wants. SIMPLE and QUICK and NICE!

The plumbing to the panel turned out beautiful...but man is is a TON of hard-line!

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