Roll Cage Measurements

[SC74]

This questions stems from me being too tall for my Bronco. When we built my cage for the crawler we used measurements from 2 cages on our complete broncos. The cage in Jessica's blue bronco was built by Van Tumblin in Laurens way back when and Keith's cage is a Smittybuilt with the front legs.

Since neither one of these broncos had a hard top on it, we based the crawler cage off of these measurements, which were both very close to each other at aprox 43.5" from floop pan to bottom of roll bar. The Smittybuilt only has the 2 legs to the front and one cross-bar behind the windshield wiper motor. Mine has one more bar centered b/w the driver and passenger running front to back.

Now that we're building mine and adding more support tubing, my head is hitting the other cross/support tubes. I had planned on doing one tube centered from front to back (which is already burned in) and then adding an "X" over the cockpit area also. Without hacking my floor out, I can't have any other support tubes unless I want a concussion every time I hit the trail.

What does your cage measure from the floor pan to the bottom of tube on the driver side (at the bottom of the floor drop)? cratchhe:

After looking at pictures of BigJake's red bronco, it looks like his goes up several more inches. Jarrett - can you fit a hard or soft top on yours like that? I'm still wanting to run a soft top on it and that's why I didn't raise the cage to start with, but now I'm questioning myself.

Sorry it's so long :popc1:

[bigjake6]

My distance is 46" from the bottom of the tube to lowest part of the floor, so 47.75 to the top of the tube. Note, the cross bar sits 6.75" from the windshield frame...at this distance, the floor to hard top distance is 48". The distance from my driver's floor pan to the top of the windshild frame is 44.5".

No, I cannot fit a hard top over my roll bar, but this is because the hoop that runs behind the seats is too wide for the hard top to clear. So I don't know for sure if my front roll bar would clear the hard top, but I suspect it would clear by about 0.25".

I took some measurements on my other broncos that have hard tops. As I look at the hard tops, they slope significantly to meet the top of the windshield frame, so the closer your cross bar is to the windshield the less clearance you will have...like I said, my cross bar is 6.75" from the windshield, and I feel that I could barely fit inside a distance of 48". A cross bar closer to the windshield would have less clearance by 0.5-1" depending on how close you are to the windshield. HTH.

[SC74]

Yes, that's a huge help. We moved the cross bar that is parallel to the windshield frame back too in order to clear the wiper motor. It sounds like the front of your cage is about 2.5" higher than mine above the front seats and I agree that it should fit very closely. An extra 2.5" and I wouldn't be having this problem, but it's too late to re-invent the wheel and re-work the entire cage.

Thanks for taking the time to measure for me!

[bone collector]

is it head room you need is there anyway to lower you seat? mabbe that would mess up your view dunno just throwin out an idea.

[bigjake6]

robert-why not bend your "x" bar so that it tapers down 2.5" at each end, so it still ties into the main cage yet creates the 2.5" of more head room? I guess I need to look at your pics to see if this is possible.

[SC74]

robert-why not bend your "x" bar so that it tapers down 2.5" at each end, so it still ties into the main cage yet creates the 2.5" of more head room? I guess I need to look at your pics to see if this is possible.

I could do that. My entire cage rakes from the back down to the front. I guess it would be a 2.5" rise in the front and about a 1.5" rise in the back, but it could be done. There's a lot of tube wasted on bends like that though b/c to get that little neck of a turn down you've got to bend an extra foot of tube to get that full bend sense it is at the end of the tube.

[SC74]

is it head room you need is there anyway to lower you seat? mabbe that would mess up your view dunno just throwin out an idea.

Yes, I'm trying to get head room. I looked at how hard it would be to lower the seat. It's not worth the effort - you'd have to cut a lot of the floor out and re-work it. My tub is lined inside and out so I would ruin that also, but good way of thinking outside of the box.