Rollbar Installation

Here's the S&W 8-point roll bar as installed in our 1990 Mustang GT. The bar was fitted, assembled and welded by a professional welder and I must say he did an excellent job with the fitting and welding. We only installed the cage as a 6-point cage, omitting the two braces that would have normally run from the intersection of the cross-bar and main hoop down to the frame rails near the transmission tunnel. We omitted these simply for weight considerations. The cage is S&W's mild steel, NHRA certified (when installed properly) cage that can be had for about $150, minus installation. Although the mild steel version is heavier than its chromoly sibling, its considerably cheaper.

We did all the prep work ourselves which started with a complete gutting of the interior. This was painful, as it was the first major operation on our 'baby' that really dropped the bomb of never returning to stock form. The pain was offset by our aspirations of breaking into the elevens...and doing it in full compliance of the NHRA safety requirements. Out came the seats, carpet, center console (real PITA) and all the little items in-between. With the interior gutted, we stripped out all of the sound insulation buried throughout the interior. This included the preformed mats that are glued to the back of interior panels, the thick padding on the back of the carpet, and meticulously chiseling out all of the 9-year-old sound deadening tar in the floor pan. This tar had hardened to a rock hard consistency and the only way that we could find to get it out (without a fourteen gigawatt heat gun) was to chisel it little-by-little by hammer and chisel (or screwdriver as it was). It came up in pieces ranging from dust to maybe four inches square at the largest...needless to say it took a lot of chiseling. In all, I'd say that it took the four of us (me, the wife and boys) about 10 hours of total work to get the tar paper out off the floor pan. We bagged it all up and I'd estimate that there was about 25 or 30 pounds of the stuff, so the work went a long ways towards offsetting the estimated 85 pounds of roller weight. All the gray areas of the floor pan in the following pictures is area where the sound deadener was applied. [Click on any of the photos to view a larger version]

Off to the welder it went with only the dash and a driver's seat installed. Talk about loud! Without any of the interior in place, you might as well have been routing the exhaust straight into your left ear. One word of advice: Leave the rear side panels in place while having the bar welded in. These are the interior side panels running from the back of the doors all the way back to the hatch (or seat in a notchback). You can loosen them up, but leave them in the vehicle so that the welder can install the bar around the panels. Its entirely possible that if the cage is installed tightly, that you've never be able to get these panels back in place after the cage is welded in. I've known people that removed them and actually had to cut/break the panels up to get them back into position. We loosened and removed them during the de-insulating process but then put them back into position and used duct tape to hold them firmly in place during the cage installation.

Upon returning from the welder's shop, we taped off the inside with newspapers and trash bags and even taped off the exterior of the car for fear of over spray. We spray painted the bar black using a gloss black, exterior automotive 'frame & suspension' paint. We applied three coats using about one can of spray paint for each coat. We didn't get quite as tough of a finish as we had hoped, mainly because we were trying to paint in a fairly cold garage during late winter. If we had been able to have the garage and the cage at a good seventy degrees, we would have gotten a much smoother and tougher finish.

We reinstalled all of the interior, without any extra screws when we were finished...a triumph in itself. Everything went back in place pretty tightly and we haven't really noticed any excess rattling as we had feared. We finished the installation up by wrapping the bars with padding in the required areas as well as a few areas where I didn't want the everyday wear and tear to scratch the bar up. Though not shown in these pictures, we also wrapped the main hoop around the head/helmet area. NHRA requirements call for roller padding to be applied anywhere that the head/helmet may contact during a crash. This is basically from the junction of the door bar and main hoop, up and around the main hoop to about the midpoint of the top bar.

We installed the door bars as welded bars, not the swing outs as you'll see some people use. I'm still fairly young (34 years old) and can manage to climb between the bar and the steering wheel. The 1990 models don't have tilt steering wheels, so the fit is kind of tight, even for a 5'-8", 170 pound weakling like myself. You might be able to gain a little additional room between the bar and the steering wheel if you lowered the attachment point of the door bar and main hoop, but it still has to meet the NHRA requirement of having the door bar pass somewhere between your shoulder and elbow when seated in your normal driving position. I guess if we had it to do all over again, we probably would have opted for the swing out door bar, at least for the driver's side. As it is, I manage just fine and the wife doesn't even seem to mind crawling over the bar when she drives the car.

We had the installer weld a tab on each side of the cross bar directly behind each seat so that we could attach the 5-point harness(es). We currently don't have a harness on the passenger's side, but we wanted the tab installed so that we could put a harness in for the passenger whenever we felt like it (or had the extra money). The submarine strap (crotch) is attached to the box structure of the seat support. The seat is factory mounted by two studs, one for each of the front brackets (versus bolts at the back brackets) that are tack welded to a stamped sheet metal box structure running from the transmission tunnel over to the door jamb along the floor. If you cut a small access opening in this box beam structure, a j-clip style nut can be installed for securing the submarine belt. [Note that the submarine belt MUST be installed for the harness to be legal for use under 11.99 seconds. There has been some confusion about this since the NHRA/IHRA rules don't explicitly call for the submarine belt, but we've seen several people fail tech inspection for not having the belt installed]. The j-clip nut is the sheet metal nut that you find all over the car; you know that spring steel clip that they slide over the thin sheet metal. Just take a look at how the stock sway bar is attached to the control arms in the rear and you'll understand what I'm talking about. You can pick up a 3/8" or 1/2" j-clip at most hardware stores in the specialty fasteners section. The lap belt attaches to the stock seat belt locations on the transmission tunnel and lower door jamb. We left the stock seat belt intact, although I'm not really sure why (it'll probably get removed soon to save some additional weight). The harness we picked was a RJS Racing duck-bill style harness with 3" main belts and 2" submarine belt...cheap but effective.

If you're in the northeastern Ohio area and are interested in having a bar/cage installed, drop me an email and I'll pass along information on the welder who installed ours. He's done quite a few notable Ford racer's installations (such as Cory Roth, John Edwards and Johnnie Kinter) and does all sorts of other fabrication & welding, up to and including full tube chassis construction.