Building your own custom frame?

[Marcus SC&C]

Start off by reading (and rereading and rereading etc.) Herb Adams Chassis Engineering and Carroll Smith`s Engineer to Win, in that order. Your first challenge is good design and fabricating skills. Suspension geometry,material selection and such will come in later on down the road. I`ve had the opportunity to work on a lot of custom chassis cars from road race cars to home built street rods. The most common problems are fabrication and simple design related. Weak single shear mounts,horrible weak welds that look like wads of old chewing gum,total lack of triangulation etc. These problems can be avoided with just a little basic knowledge,common sense and skill. To put it bluntly these are the kinds of mistakes most likely to make you crash.

Those 2 books will give you a good start. The rest of Carroll Smith`s books will also be a big help. But remember all the engineering and computer testing in the world won`t help you if your welds have poor penetration and break! I suspect that after reading up on the subject thoroughly you`ll decide that building a whole frame/suspension from scratch is not something you really want to do. Consider buying a kit or frame/suspension sections from Chassisworks or Morrision etc. and put it together. It`ll let you get involved in the frame fab process but help you to avoid the major pitfalls. Mark SC&C