You know all those photos we love of the completely gutted car shell sitting on the build table at Troy's or Rodger's place ?
Well we never seem to see any photos of how it got there ! Here's how mine worked, I think this is what they do at Rad Rides (?)
(Note this photo below is the roof coming off my old chassis - see how I kept just the barest bit of metal holding the door jam on ? It saves a lot of time if you can index something like that even roughly)
BTW that roof section with a-pillars, sail panels, and 16 lbs of dynamat permanently stuck on the inside of the roof weighed 120 lbs. OUCH
I started drilling holes in the unibody roof support structure but it was only 22 awg steel and I calculated that if I drilled 2" diameter holes all through the structure it would save like 1.2 lbs. So I gave up on that.. Lightening holes are almost worthless compared to using the correct and lightweight material in the first place when you are building something.
The next most important step is of course getting the roof placed right. I probably spent a few weeks mocking that up and testing the door fit before tacking it in place. The first big deal is getting the door pillars in the correct place. So clamping down the a-pillars I attached the doors to index the jams and verify the fit of the roof (thank goodness the top of the door on these cars is perfectly level). I also knew the correct angle of the windshield pillars to help me.
Next finish up the rear filler panel and deck, you can see how the interior panels have been built here, generally .063 aluminum with dynamat on the top side bent in a cheap brake and pop riveted and siliconed together. Sounds cheesy on paper but a large diameter 3/16" pop rivet every inch is pretty secure. A 1ft square of 20 awg steel is almost 2 lbs. A 1 ft square of .063 aluminum is 0.7 lbs, with dynamat its about 1.8 lbs. Of course, I now realize the aluminum is worthless for fire protection compared to the steel. Besides the weight, I use as much aluminum as I can because it doesn't rust. I can't stand seeing rust and I have a very difficult time preventing corrosion working in my carport and without any skill at painting/sealing stuff.
Here you can see the replacement filler panel attached. I used a cheap harbor freight brake, and a cheap Eastwood shrinker/stretcher to build all sorts of these panels and stuff.
I probably should go more into the process of indexing the body and stuff as it took weeks and weeks of configuring and reconfiguring, but its kind of boring. Just make sure you have a good centerline through the whole build, and put on as many body panels as you can mock up to make sure everything lines up. For example my "unibody" still had a place to bolt on the hood hinges to line the hood up, and as seen above I could mount the doors correctly as well.
here is a shot of the seat being mocked (make sure your head and helmet fit the roof). In my case since the floor was so low I actually have a lot of good clearance to the roof and even have pretty good clearance from the cage for street driving without a helmet. In fact my bare head is about the same distance from the high density padding on the upper side bar as it is from the unibody structure when it was a normal car. Note also the big 2*2 bar holding up the sail panels for mockup. By shimming that bar with 1/8" steel pads I could get the perfect alignment. Note also the double shear brackets for the seat belts. The car is setup so I can run shoulder belts and 6 point harnesses at the same time.