One of the things you quickly discover when building this car is how it’s incredibly low to the ground. Yes, you can use the air suspension to raise it up for getting over things like steep inclines and speed bumps, but what gets you in a pickle when you want to get a jack under the car is that the body wraps down around the outside of the frame.
This leaves you basically no area where you can get a jack under the car. Even when you raise it with the air suspension the overlap of the body hits the arm of the jack before the face of the jack hits the frame. This is more so a problem with the rear of the car as there are “some” points near the front that are easier to get to with a jack.
I had previously been placing a bottle jack under the rear corner of the car where the rear bumper beam meets the side of the frame. This was even a bit of a pain in the butt because that area is actually really high off of the ground and I needed to build-up a bunch of boards to make the bottle jack reach. But now that I have my exhaust tips in those locations it means that even the bottle jack approach wasn’t going to work.
This meant I needed to create some jack points in a location where I could actually reach with the floor jack. I decided that I was going to add these on both sides of the afterburner.
To get the strength I needed I laminated two 2×2 tubes together. This would give me four pieces of vertical steel to provide lots of strength. For the jack surface I welded on some 1/8″ steel as a bottom plate.
I then raised these pieces into position and pressed them up underneath the rear bumper beam so that they were under a good solid part of the frame. I made the height of these jack points be just right so that the bottom was flush with the bottom of the trunk pan.
You can see that I tucked the jack point in a little bit behind the afterburner mounting area. This overlap would give me a nice spot to weld the side of the material. I’ll also eventually weld in a couple of pieces of steel to join the bottoms of the jack points together to seal off the area behind the afterburner. But that will wait until I get the car up in the air. Everything was then seam welded around the jack point to make for a nice strong structure.
Here you can see what the points look like when viewing the car from the rear. I’m thinking these areas might also come in handy for eventually mounting the exhaust tips 🙂
Building The BatBerry 