New Car to be crushed
Posted by Tim Mckay on 01/12/2011
As any one who has driven ‘Grizzly’ at Leisure Pursuits will tell you, one of the highlights of the experience is a drive over the top of two reinforced cars, at least they should be reinforced!
Back in February this year, ‘Grizzly’ slid sideways, beaching herself on the left hand car. We don’t have a vehicle that can easily tow eight tons of monster truck, and with the soft ground in February every time we managed to mover her enough to get a wheel on the ground, as soon as it spun it instantly dug a hole out underneath it.
After an hour and a half we finally pulled her off, but we were left with a rather battered Volvo. It did last another nine months but at the beginning of November the inevitable happened as Grizzly lined up for a routine drive over the cars we heard was an almighty bang followed by the cheers and clapping of the spectators, the left hand car had finally collapsed.
We didn’t manage to find another Volvo 240, and with the high price of scrap it was proving difficult to find any saloon cars. In the end we acquired a Nissan. It seemed a shame to use a perfectly serviceable car with low mileage and leather interior, but with the next monster truck date in just a weeks, what the hell!
With senior instructor ‘Edd’ on the case stripping out the interior it didn’t take long and I even gave him a hand to carefully remove the back window!
With the interior and carpets removed we then welded box section to the floor of the car, one in each of the front foot well’s and one right across the back of the car. Next we fitted three roll hoops onto the floor mounts made from 4mm thick 50mm tube, these hoops were then all connected with three interlinking sections of tube across the roof. As the rear hoop was at a less up right angel than the front and rear hoops we triangulated this one in to the boot, we also welded plate over the sun roof. Finally we made ramps to run up the front of the windscreen and prepared strapping for the back window space, but both of these will get fitted in position in the field.
As the car still had a running engine we were able to drive it in to position with a little help from the Land Rover in the muddy spots.
Once we had the car in position we filled the boot and engine bay with a mix of hardcore and 10mm shingle, then welded the front bars and rear strapping on. Now all that remained was to put my welding to the test with Grizzly on top.
