Building a Van Rotisserie / Roll Over Rig

So here's my attempt at making a van rotisserie. Having had a look at others on the web and the SSVC  forum

I priced up the cost of box section steel at over £150, so when a conversation about the progress of my van project revealed that a work mate had several scaffold poles at the bottom of his garden. I thought it would be worth giving it a go. 

The poles are 50mm and about 3mm thick. A £10 50mm hole saw in a pillar drill made short work cutting up the poles.

I cut and drilled a couple of blocks of wood as templates for my 45deg + 22.5deg cuts.
A marker pen and cutting disc to trim the poles to the correct length, they needed a little touching up to get the angles spot on.

I picked up a metre of 6mm steel plate from a big mucky bloke who picked up off the steel yard floor the first bit of rusty plate that was not stuck under the loading truck, I timidly asked if that was 6mm thick, with a grunt that I think was a Yes it was chucked under a saw and I was charged £17.

So not the best quality but enough good for this.

I've made my design a little different from others, with only one angle. This is because of the height restrictions in my garage. I wanted to get the van in the garage on its side so the poles needed to be closer to the side.

Because I'm using round pole I could only join the poles at 90 deg of each other because the cut needed for other angles was to complicated, so this limited where I could fit my uprights, The two limiting factors led to having just the one angle.

I started with the uprights welded to the plates, then the lower pole. I calculated the best place for the lateral pole then welded that to the plate. Then the side upright was fitted and welded all together with the angle that was cut to fit the gap. I made sure the rig was attached to both sides so it would spread the load across the van when on its side.

I tacked the plates and tubes in place and welded them together off the van for better access.

But when I tried to reinstall the rig it had moved with the heat and would not fit. I needed to cut off the outer upright and re weld it

Here's a shot of the gap in the joint, this ensured I got a decent penetrating weld around the joint.

Once the back was done I pulled off the front beam, this is a Bay window ball joint 69 beam. This was cheaper than getting my king and link pins replaced at the time. 

One of the wheel arches I'd stripped before, but there's still the usual rust above the beam mounts

The cab belly doesn't look too bad apart from the centre support I forgot to paint and has now gone rusty.

To make the front plates I rubbed my dirty fingers over a piece of A4 to get a rubbing of the front mount holes. I drew a cross over the center of the holes as a guide and then drilled them by hand with a battery drill. Not the best way to drill 14mm holes but I didn't have access to the pillar drill.

I jigged the front up the same as the back but its was on a slight angle when I tacked it but didn't put it right. I did put some washers under one of the plates to give me a bit of a gap to help installation.

I laid out the tacked jig and welded each side. I also made sure to grind away all the galvanizing as this messed up my first few welds and I couldn't work out why.

The front rig slid under a lot better that the back one.

So here's my rotisserie made in 3 days for £27 + welding gas and burnt flesh.

I'll get a video of when I first roll it over and see how good my welding is! I'll make sure the camera person isn't in the line of roll.