Cleetus McFarlands "Eagle" gets more tubes! How much POWER???

Got plenty of room up there for you, Danny. I don't think you can see over the dash barely. Me looking out from here, the dash bar, I can only see just the very top of the strut cup. We haven't mounted a steering column yet because we're working on an adjustable steering column that isn't quite ready yet. So once that is ready, then we will mount the steering column. We want this to be the first car we put it in. That way, if we want to let someone else drive between our adjustable pedal kit, adjustable steering column, and a pouring seat, you'll be able to fit whoever wants to fit in here. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to CJ Racecar's YouTube channel. Today, I got some time-lapse stuff going of Danny fitting some tubes in the dual frame rail and the kidney bar on Cletus McFarland's The Eagle. We'll go over that with him. We'll show you the tubing notch that we use, how he fits them, some safety stuff, what the seat's made out of, and we'll also talk about why those bars need to be where they're going to be and how much power this car is going to make. What are you working on now? A kidney bar behind the seat in the corner. A complicated bar to do being as you can see here, the notch goes into two tubes. Anytime you notch into two tubes, the other end, you can't notch into the tubes unless one of them is not welded and you can fit it up there and then close the door on it, so to speak, and lock it in place. Since you can't do that here, you have to have one side that is not going into a corner or you can't get the bar in. So what I do is, since everything is on a strange angle and this is not a straight notch, it leans in, which means the notches are not 180 degrees from each other. They roll into each other. I took a piece of tubing like so and I messed with the notch and I kept playing with it until I had it where I thought about where it was going to be. I took note of my angles and all that. Then I cut my real bar and you kind of have to guesstimate about where this bend is going to go. If you get it too low, it'll hit the seat. If you get it too high, you get a big gap in here. I mean big. So I took the bar, did my notch down here and then of course I had it long up here. So then what you do is you just start, you kind of eyeball where this is going to go in the center and you make a mark on your tube where the center of your notch is going to be. Then you go over to the notcher and you just, I notched this down so I got, as you can see right here, that corner barely clears this tube. Once you get that tube, this edge right here, you've got to get that edge low enough that it will go between here. Once it does that, now it goes in, which it does this. When it does that, you'll open up a little gap. You have no choice but to do that. This one here came out pretty close. Yeah, it looks really good. I've got a good notch here. I've got a good notch here. This is fine. No big deal here. It doesn't touch the seat. Pretty close to the seat, so there's not a lot of flex going on. And off of these two bars here is where we put our mount for our seat belt, for the lap belt. You can make a plate that goes in here. You can weld a tab on, but a tab is just not strong enough, I don't think, by itself. What we did on a previous car, I like, is we put a smaller diameter tube from here down to here, and offset notch it. And then you put a piece of plate in here, and you weld the plate in, and you have a hole in it. So you have a very strong anchor point. Never going to mess, never going to pull out, never going to bend, never going to break. And then we can see where the seat is not in the way of the tubes, in the general area where the lap belt's going to go, and it's probably going to be an oval hole right in this vicinity right here. You want the seat belt to come through as parallel to this as you can, and then around the driver. Same thing on the other side. And seat belt's always inside of the frame, that's an NHRA rule, and it just makes sense. If you had a seat belt go outside this tab, let's say you'd have to go through this to get to it, but if pavement or anything ever hit this, something hit it, it would cut the belt, belt's gone. Now the driver's loosing the seat. Put the belt behind it, you're okay. Since the tube has a little gap here, you can run the belt through behind the tube, and then it also will go into this slot, which is usually about so wide, so you can get the buckle and everything in through it. Everything's good. This area here is kind of critical, and kind of a pain to fit. It's satisfying once it fits. Oh yeah, yeah, and the driver's compartment obviously is one of the most crucial parts of the entire chassis because it's got to be safe. It is, it is. Everything about this area is all parts work together. Yeah, with everything going on, it's designed to keep the driver safe, keep the driver inside the car, your arms inside the car if it starts rolling around or doing crazy. Hopefully none of that ever happens, but if it does, you want to be safe. That's one of the good things about the way we do our bunny car cages. We run the main hoop up here instead of back here, and then putting a bar in here and a bar down this way and all that. When you're back in there, your arm is going to have a real hard time getting outside that car. There'll be a window net that probably goes to about here. It ain't coming out. No. It's not coming out. So, I like this design way better than the other one. It just looks better, more functional. About four years ago, we switched to the hoop in the front. There's multiple ways you can do it. You can do it with the hoop in the front there. You can do it with the hoop to the middle of the bunny car cage. You can do it where the hoop is the very back of the bunny car cage. This is what we've come up with. This is our style. This is what we like. I think it's safer. I think it's stronger. That's what we run with. It is a little more work. If you move the hoop to the back, the back of the bunny car cage bar is going to be straight. It'd be a lot less labor, but it just looks better and it's much safer. That's what is important when building a car like this. So, this is what we do. Walk around the other side of the car and you can see that. I had three bars that I was working on today and all three of them are kind of like that, where they're captured on both ends to where you can't just line it up, get an accurate mark where you're going to bend it or notch it and go with it. You've got to guesstimate about what you're going to have and work each end, each end, each end until you get it where you want it and hopefully your notches line up. First one we did, if the seat is over farther, you don't have to have this bar do what it does here. It can be just from there straight down like this, but due to the seat being moved in because the hoop is moved in somewhat and everything, you have to do something with this bar. We've had some where I could come down and make a bend and have it just like Siamese right up against it, but not on this car. So, we two-pieced it because if you put a curve on that bottom piece or whatever, it actually doesn't do anything for strength and it's a more time-consuming notch to make. So, we put these in, they're the same angle as this, so cosmetically they look good, functional same, same distance out, so everything looks nice and straight. This bar couldn't go straight because of the seat, so I had to put a slight bend in it and go around and it lands on the four-link bracket in a very specific spot where you can't just kind of move it around. This here is not too bad of a notch to make, it's pretty much equal on both sides, but again, this tube here is pulled around a little bit like this from this, so you have to notch the back side of these notches deeper than the front, otherwise it doesn't fit. You could probably weld it, but it wouldn't be good. So, again, another bar is a little complicated to make and then there'll be a weld going around these tubes just for added strength to tie it all in, but it would be fine if you didn't do that. That's what we have to do when on these seats a lot of times. You have to put the seat where you want it, get it sideways up and down everything where you want it, and then you have to make some bars conform to it. Yeah, they came out really good. You can see what he's talking about on this side, the rear three bars right there are straight, there's no obstructions on this side. On this side, because of the seat, you can see that three-quarter bar has a bend in it. This bar is a two-piece, one on the top, one on the bottom, so that's the difference. It's still structurally strong there and the driver fits good, so that's what's important. Yeah, the dual frame rail is actually not even required for SFI. It's just a structural thing for how fast these cars go. It needs it to be stiff enough, but it's not actually required for the certification. Some cars with less horsepower actually work better without double frame rails. Yes, cars with a lot, with very little horsepower, they like a little less. Yeah, but when you get this much horsepower... How much horsepower is this thing going to make, Danny? I don't know on turbos so much. I'm thinking they're probably around 4,000. Maybe a little bit more. It's going to make closer to 5,000 horsepower. This one is, yeah. It should be pretty quick. 5,000 horsepower and 24,000-2,500 pounds. Should run pretty good. Yeah, you don't want to squirm around going down the racetrack. And tomorrow you're going to work on funny car cage stuff. Funny car cage stuff, I get that going along real good. I'll do the bars that go under the seat, and then that area is pretty much taken care of. We still have to do the final trim of this, and it'll probably wind up being something like we'll come up here about the center of the bar, it'll turn, and it'll follow the bar. And then somewhere in this area, it will turn and go up, back. It just depends on... We have a bar that goes in here and around and comes out over to here. When we have that bar in position where we know it's going to be, that determines what we do with this part of the seat. Because there'll be a small half-inch tube that comes off of that, wraps around the corner here a little bit, and it comes down to where it'll curve along like this. We want to give him enough room for his arm to be able to do this when he's shifting or reaching over for CO2 or anything. He has to have that part of the seat going for this part of his arm. But we don't want to have it more than we have. Yeah. Yeah, you want to have as much side support as possible. Even just a dual frame rail comes way up to your ribs probably almost, to the bottom of your ribs. So that's a lot of side support. But we do want to keep as much side support as we can. But you do have to knock some of it out so that you can grab the shifter and you can shift it and get the fire bottles and everything else you need to do. He's going to have a lot of support and a lot of comfort in that seat when it's laid back like that. Oh yeah, that's going to be comfortable. It is very comfortable. And we get it down as low as we can get it down. How much more do you lower it since the time it was here? About three quarters or so? Probably about three quarters of an inch. Also, something else a few people asked about like a Racetech seat or containment seat. We don't use those. We use these. There's a few good things about this seat. If Cletus puts a seat in there and does the pouring, which is what we'll do, which will fit him exactly how he likes it. If he wanted to let James drive it or someone else drive it, they could actually do a pouring. It would raise them up and fit them perfectly. So not only that, on the top up here, we'll have some head supports, head containment stuff up there. So it's pretty much is like a containment seat. It's just multiple piece. And if you think this is bad for room here, you got a eighth inch piece of carbon Kevlar seat. Now, if you put one of those containment seats in, we would never get it low enough in this car to fit. So this is the only option. This is what we run in all our cars. Super safe, super strong being Kevlar and carbon. Tomorrow we'll do some more video. I'm going to try to set up a time lapse and get more of actual work going on. It's kind of loud in here during the day, which some of you guys have noticed before we got mics, it was hard to understand anything. But we'll try to do more of the guys actually working on it when people are here so that you can see the process of it and how these things are actually built 2,000 hours later. Alright everyone, that's it for this video. We'll try to give you guys updates every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, the best we can. Thanks for watching. Make sure you like, share and subscribe and we'll keep putting out videos.