Well as it turns out my Waterjet guy works a lot faster than I expected, and my parts were ready this afternoon. Pretty good since I just emailed him the drawings last night, and dropped off the steel this morning. So now I'll explain what I'm up to.

First, for those that aren't familiar with buggy construction you'll need to understand the more typical style of building. Very generally speaking most people start out with 2 parallel frame rails, like your trucks frame, only tube. Then they build a subframe that extends down from these rails in the center of the rig to support the drivetrain and provide mounting points for the suspension. Heres a pic of Jason Paules rig to demonstrate.



As you can see there is a lot of tube in there with a fair amount of complexity. Plus you also have a number of fabricated tabs for the suspension links to bolt to. What I'm doing is replacing that entire subframe with fabricated plate steel. I designed up side plates in AutoCAD and had them cut out on a waterjet. Each side of the chassis will have 2 identical plates that sandwich the suspension joints, and form that side of the chassis subframe. The nice part about this is I dont have to bend much tube, I dont have to make any brackets, and locating the suspension links is as simple as running a bolt through the plates. It also allowed me to easily build in multiple upper link mount locations for some adjustability. Heres a pic of the plates I had cut, there are 2 of each of these. The ones with the 6 upper holes are for the passenger side, the others are for the drivers side.





and here is roughly how the passenger side plate will be positioned in relation to the drivetrain.




After picking up the plates I also finished up torching off all the brackets on the rear axle. There had been a bunch of extra tabs for traction bars and shocks added so it took a while, but its all nice and clean now.




Dallas