Marc's Public Blog - Cars

I had promised myself that I wouldn't go to a drive like this before getting my rollbar (better be safe than sorry).
Now that I had it, it was time to give the drive a shot. Dr Wong gave a quick introduction and filled in for the speaker, who wasn't able to show up that day, and gave everyone a warning about not driving over their capabilities.
The drive went fine, and as a bonus, we saw a huge convoy of bikers heading north on HWY 1 (more than 500 of them)
The picts are here

(All the pictures of the install can be found here)
It's a bit embarassing to admit that getting a rollbar was the first thing I wanted to do after buying the car, and that it took me about a year to actually get it. I think it was first a matter of finding the bar that was right for my car, which I got to do by seeing the different kind of bars available on other BAMA members' cars.

I ended up going with the Hard Dog Sport bar (I didn't like the looks of the autopower too much, and I didn't want the diagonal from the hard core bar)

After that, it was a matter of actually buying the bar, and figuring out whether I was going to get it professionally installed or if I was going to do it myself (with other people's help). I knew it was a real pain to install and I seriously considered professional installation (about $300), but several BAMA members talked me into saving my money and accepting their help with installing the bar

Can't I just duct tape the bar on the car? It seems faster


Even moving the damn bar is hard, it doesn't fit in the trunk

Several people in BAMA kindly offered their help with installing the rollbar, and I ended up accepting John Formoso's help as he organized a tech afternoon at his place (6-7 of us showed up and did miscellaneous modifications to our cars, two or us installed rollbars). John rules, he knows his stuff

Bigger is better, right?


Some of the others who showed up that day and helped (including Jason Cuadra who was doing his rollbar too)

So, then came the time to get to work. Jason helped me take the car apart, and get to the car body where the rollbar was going to be bolted

taking the car apart wasn't too hard


You gotta work around that pesky ECU, which not content of broking the back seat, also was in the way of the roll bar


The car need to be jacked up so that you can remove the wheels...




... and install bolt plates to help bolt the bar to frame

The painful part is the holes you have to make in the frame so that the bolts can be passed through (and since they're in a place where you can't really drill holes, the common method is to drill through an innocent piece of frame with a long drill bit so that you can drill the second layer of frame, where the bolts need to go (sorry, I was too verklempt to take pictures)

And it's not over, you thn need to do more cutting a fitting (takes more than 2 hours, especially for the plastic that goes around the bar, down by the door frame

Cutting isn't very hard, but cutting the right amount in the right place is


that piece of plastic to cut and fit is probably the worst part. Just very time consuming to get it right

I ended up putting the pieces back together around 23:00 (thanks to John for being so patient, helpful, and having so many of the right tools I needed)

almost done


I guess it does look better than the first picture

All the other pictures of the install can be found here