Seam Welding And Welded In Cages

[ToyotaTech15]

As my shell is getting prepped for paint just now and will be running as a track car this year and for more to come i am debating getting the shell strengthend (seam or spot welded) and the cage welded instead of bolted.

Its be a 7 point cusco cage with a rear crossover a floor bar behind seats and a roof bar above sunvisors.

Obviously i have rear strut braces, top and bottom front sturt brace , uprated front and rear ARB's drop links, anti lift kit, and uprated bushes all round, but if ill be running alot of power i dont want the chances of cracking in future.

What you guys think? as ill need it all done before paint

Cheers

Gary

[Sanchez]

Yeah if your going for chassis strength then your going to want to seam weld it and get the cage welded not bolted in mate

[Russleh]

noob question time. what exactly is seam weldin and how does it help. i can figure out that it involves some sort of welding of seams haha

[ToyotaTech15]

Well the panels of the car is spot welded together which means its strong enough for what the car is desighned to do, but when you got throwing it roound a track with a few hundred horses it can easlily crack.

So its just inch long welds that holds the panels better and greatly increases chassis rigidity.

There is different types of seam welding i think thou

Gary

[chr15_7_t_]

so do u weld a wee bit or every seem the eye can see lol?

[paul.]

yep weld it up!

[Driver]

Well the panels of the car is spot welded together which means its strong enough for what the car is desighned to do, but when you got throwing it roound a track with a few hundred horses it can easlily crack.

So its just inch long welds that holds the panels better and greatly increases chassis rigidity.

There is different types of seam welding i think thou

Gary

The inch long welds you do intermittently is called stitch welding, its big on the XE powered nova/corsa scene.

If your seam welding you weld all the seams solid with no gaps in the weld.

[ToyotaTech15]

well what I heard about stitch welding is that if the shell is damaged in a crash it can be straightened but if it's seam welded with no gaps it's harder to fix if you get me

Gary

[riko666]

The issue with seam-welding though is that at you gain structural rigidity at the expense of crash performance. It's all fair and well chasing ultimate specifications, but you should weigh the benefits first - in a crash, the spot welds are meant to split along the panel seams, thus disspating crash energy, seam weld these and a lot less impact energy is going to be absorbed by the chassis and be a lot more damaging in the end. And to what benefit? Granted, seam welding yields a very approximate figure of 10-15% extra body shell rigidity, but you'd be hard pushed to notice a difference if you're not an experienced driver on track with many hours of chassis development; people can shout the praises of strut braces all they want, but fact of the matter is that chassis development is far more indepth.

I reckon a welded in roll-cage, if this is solely a track-driven car, will be ideal - you strengthen the main passenger sell, whilst maintaining the energy dissipating channels on the vehicle seams. There's more ways to improve track performance, or rather, better value ways! Such as track tuition - I don't want to sound like a broken record, but you have to be realistic if you're serious about improving the track performance of a vehicle; the only way to understand how a modification achieves what its designed to achieve, is to know what you are looking for. If you blindly prepare the vehicle, you have no baseline to start from and understand your vehicle from.

So yeah, from that, seam-welding certainly is beneficial for the structural rigidity of the vehicle, but it does come at the expense of crash performance; I'd start off with the roll-cage, get to acclimitise and familiarise yourself with your vehicle and take it from there