Lane's SCA - Project 92 SC - Weight Reduction (6)

I've realized that I probably won't be driving the car on the trrack in the rain (and I wouldn't have rain tires along anyway). A couple of coats of Rain-X on the windshield will replace the wiper motor, transmission assembly, wiper arms and blades, washer tank & lines, and washer fluid. Weight savings: 15 lbs.

I picked up an air intake used that is made of aluminum instead of steel (shown on top, in comparison to a Hotshot intake in yellow on the bottom). You can find quite a few of these inexpensive aluminum intakes on eBay. While the Hotshot weighs 4.5 lbs, the aluminum model weighs only 1.2 lbs - giving a weight savings of about 3 lbs.

Weigh-in #1 - 9/2005

I've made enough progress at weight reduction thus far where I was interested in knowing the vehicle's actual weight. Some care was taken to get the car to its lightest configuration (see below) before driving it to the local landfill. They use a vehicle scale to determine how much to charge each person, as their dumping fee is based on the weight of the load of junk you've brought. While a person may likely call ahead to politely ask, "Would you weigh my race car?", I thought that would present too much of an opportunity for such a request to be turned down. To minimize the chance of this happening, I decided to just show up, quickly roll onto the scale, and walk inside to inquire what the vehicle weighed without giving anyone a chance to question or object. It ended up working out just fine.

Total weight: 1990 lbs.
Weight from the factory: approx 2400 lbs (although it is not specified what options are installed on the vehicle for this weight)

* The scale's margin of error is unknown.
* Car was weighed in its lightest configuration. This included MT Drag slicks on front, passenger seat & harness, camera mount/camera removed, radiator "cone shield" not in place, plexi door windows not installed, no driver, and running on fumes.

A trip to the junkyard was good for a high-density styrofoam front bumper support from a 95/96 coupe (shown on top in photo). Using this one to replace the honeycomb plastic one that came on my '92 (shown on bottom in photo) made the car 3 lbs lighter.

The latch and lock mechanism were removed from the trunk lid, and the vertical support piece was carefully cut off with a hand grinder and a cutting wheel. The photo here shows the trunk lid before any cutting was done. After about an hour of work and lots of sparks...

The trunk lid is now pretty darn lean. An added bonus is the ability to set anything on top of the closed lid, let it go, and launch it across the garage - as the torsion bar hinge mechanism is expecting the lid to weigh double what it does now. This photo shows the lid after all the cutting was complete. The remaining vertical trunk lid trim piece (can be seen here) will be permanently zip-tied to the car's body so that it does not open with the remainder of the trunk lid. Getting rid of the latch, lock, and this extra bit of trunk lid metal saved 14 lbs.

Since the trunk lid torsion bar hinge is now a bit dangerous as it opens with serious force, it was time for it to go. Hood pins (which can be seen here) will now keep the trunk lid in place. Pulling this hinge mechanism out was good for 7 lbs.

I had already removed all of the headlight innards long ago, but a closer look at the brackets showed that more weight could be removed. They're made from cast aluminum, and a good amount of metal was cut away from each while preserving the mounting points for the fender, parking lamp assembly, and top outer panel. In the photo, the assembly on the bottom is before the cutting took place, and the top assembly shows after. This removed another 2 lbs.