Network
When fabricating anything, especially on a desert truck like Project Storm Trooper you need to take into consideration what is going around where you are working. If careful thought is not taken, when it comes time to disassemble the vehicle to prep, things can be a nightmare.
We turned to Rusty’s Off-Road for a little help on the truck. Rusty’s Off-Road is known for their Jeep products, but also offers a full line of fabrication parts. This just isn’t a Jeep thing! From tabs to brackets they can be found on Rusty’s builder parts section.
With the help of Rusty’s Off-Road, we were able to use four of their 1.5-inch tube clamps for our X-brace.
With Storm Trooper inching closer and closer to the starting line, we needed to add an X-brace to the rear of the truck. The X-brace would serve three purposes: tie the rear down bars together, mount our remote oil coolers, and be removable. The latter being the most important part.
The clamp is a simple design with both pieces locking into each other with the supplied hardware. Tech Tip: Put anti-seize on the bolts prior to install. Forgetting this can cause the bolts to be locked in place during final welding.
The truck’s fuel cell would be directly below the X-brace and a solid brace would not allow the fuel cell to be removed. To solve this we went with four sets of Rusty’s tube clamps (PN RC-TC150).
These tube clamps would allow us to fabricate a removable brace that when it came time to pull our fuel cell we could still do so. “We offer our tube clamps in 1.5 and 2-inch,” Rusty Megois explained. “The clamps set up to be used with .120 wall tubing and they are made of 4130 chromoly.”
For us, creating the X-brace was the easy part, it was the thought and foresight to make sure we could remove what was below. We grab a couple tubes and mocked them up on the cage. Once we had the right angles we started cutting and welding.
We put the brace to work right away. Pulling it off so we could remove the fuel cell and prep the cage for paint.
One key thing to note when installing tube clamps and making a removable brace is to make sure all the tube clamps face the right direction. It is more than just making sure all the bolts face the same direction so the brace can be removed, but making sure the clamps all remove the same way.
All said and done the clamps are just what we needed for this part of our fabrication.
There is nothing worse than getting everything buttoned up, go to remove the brace just to find out that half the clamps open the opposite direction you intended them to. Double check everything before burning all the tubes together.
In the end, we had an X-brace on our desert truck and we’re going to be able to pull the fuel cell when we need to service it. For more information on Rusty’s Off-Road’s products and their lineup of fabrication parts, be sure to visit their website.
