Hi there everyone! Our school is starting an FSAE team, and so we're getting some experience over the summer with an old red buggy that was a senior project from two years ago. The chassis was donated to us and it was used to test torque vectoring as a senior project. Unfortunately, the damn motors are so heavy and the frame is so flimsy that it throws the chains as soon as you go into a turn.

For practice and learning, I've been modelling the chassis in SolidWorks for the purpose of performing FEA analysis on it and improving the frame design. I'm not being super precise, but I have a 3D sketch of all the frame members, and I've been able to make structural members using Weldements and perform FEA on parts of the chassis. At this point however, I've hit a small roadblock:

I need to model a hinge (visible here. Actually modelling it in 3D isn't hard, but how do I do it in such a way that Simulation understands that it's a hinge?

The solidworks model of that region is visible here:
http://i.imgur.com/iUZ9ETq.png

The second problem I ran into is that I don't understand how to make a piece of sheet metal or a plate and join it to a structural member. For example, when I model the floor pan (visible here), I can't seem to get it actually be attached to anything in Simulation. What's the best way to go about doing that?

Full album of images

Thanks in advance for your help!