Car Frames: "Head On" 1938 Chevrolet Division, General Motors

more at http://quickfound.net/

THE BOX-GIRDER FRAME IS THE STRONGEST AUTOMOBILE FRAME THAT CAN BE BUILT. TO PROVE THIS, A CHEVROLET TAKES ITS PLACE IN A LINE OF FREIGHT CARS AND HOLDS ITS OWN.

Produced by Jam Handy.

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

A vehicle frame, also known as its chassis, is the main supporting structure of a motor vehicle, to which all other components are attached, comparable to the skeleton of an organism.

Until the 1930s virtually every car had a structural frame, separate from its body. This construction design is known as body-on-frame. Over time, nearly all passenger cars have migrated to unibody construction, meaning their chassis and bodywork have been integrated into one another.

Nearly all trucks, buses, and most pickups continue to use a separate frame as their chassis...

Typically the material used to construct vehicle chassis and frames is carbon steel; or aluminum alloys to achieve a more light-weight construction. In the case of a separate chassis, the frame is made up of structural elements called the rails or beams. These are ordinarily made of steel channel sections, made by folding, rolling or pressing steel plate.

There are three main designs for these. If the material is folded twice, an open-ended cross-section, either C-shaped or hat-shaped (U-shaped) results. "Boxed" frames contain chassis rails that are closed, either by somehow welding them up, or by using premanufactured metal tubing.

C-shape

By far the most common, the C-channel rail has been used on nearly every type of vehicle at one time or another. It is made by taking a flat piece of steel (usually ranging in thickness from 1/8" to 3/16", but up to 1/2" or more in some heavy-duty trucks[2][3]) and rolling both sides over to form a C-shaped beam running the length of the vehicle.

Hat

Hat frames resemble a "U" and may be either right-side-up or inverted with the open area facing down. Not commonly used due to weakness and a propensity to rust, however they can be found on 1936–1954 Chevrolet cars and some Studebakers.

Abandoned for a while, the hat frame gained popularity again when companies started welding it to the bottom of unibody cars, in effect creating a boxed frame.

Boxed

Originally, boxed frames were made by welding two matching C-rails together to form a rectangular tube. Modern techniques, however, use a process similar to making C-rails in that a piece of steel is bent into four sides and then welded where both ends meet.

In the 1960s, the boxed frames of conventional American cars were spot-welded here and there down the seam; when turned into NASCAR "stock car" racers, the box was continuously welded from end to end for extra strength...