Mick458 - Thanks for the comments, the buggy chassis is 3150mm long by 1300mm wide this is measured from the centrelines of the chassis tubes and does not include the suspension arms.
If your thinking of building one from scratch, get hold of some cad/cam software and spend some time designing it, get as many of the major parts as you can and lay them out to give you an idea of where things are going to go, and don’t underestimate just how much tube your going to need there is in excess of 280ft tube in my chassis and suspension (all 32mm / 1.25" with a 2mm wall ERW) also consider how your chassis tubes are going to be bent, (if your putting bends in that is) I tried using one of those cheap pipe benders from Machine Mart (note PIPE bender not TUBE) and nothing I did would allow me to get a decent bend out of it, they were all crap in fact those benders should be called Kinkers, I tried filling the tube with sand and all sorts!! - my answer was to go looking for a "Proper Tube bender" which draws the tube around a former rather than slamming a hydraulic ram into it, in the UK this is not something that pops up that often, so I bought the correct former from the USA waited for it to be imported and built my own bender using the former and a 10/12 tonne bottle jack, and it worked a treat! (I have a habit of building my own tools ;D )
Its also worth checking out Suspension design docs on the web, there is a surprising amount of math involved with setting it all up correctly so do your homework first!
Overall I have loved building my buggy to date, the satisfaction I get from building it all from scratch is great - dont get me wrong some times I could pull my hair out in frustration with this or that problem but in the end I know it will be more than worth all the effort that has gone into the build.
Are you planning on building a road legal buggy? - carefully consider this question, the amount of effort to create a road legal car is massive! the IVA manual is quite frankly the Devils Handbook >
And strikes fear into all those that read it - you have been warned!! - That said, everyone on this forum I have found to be very very helpful and can offer advice on a multitude of buggy related issues
(Even if some of em are SLACKERS!! ;D ;D ;D LOL)
Let me know if you want any more dimensions - and I hope I haven’t put you off the idea, and if you want to see all the build pics take a look at the build gallery on my buggy website (link in my sig), there is a lot of em though!!
Cheers and good Luck!
Rich
