ITS Ford Mustang(s) Build - Stripper Stang Part II

[Racerlinn]

Find any loose change? Or condoms?

[Ron Earp]

Couple of bucks in change, some hair bobbins, Lance cracker package, potato chips, and that was about it. Pretty clean actually.

What I did learn is things don't weigh as nearly as much as we'd like or think they do. About the only item I can remember pulling and weighing that lived up to expectations was the windows and mechanisms. Tracks, motor, runners, and glass came in right at 22.4 lbs on my certified UPS scale here at work.

Door locks were surprisingly light. Just right at one pound each for the motor/rod, and you know these things are pretty strong.

But the old "seats weigh 60 lbs each" and "sound deadening is 50 lbs" is BS. This car has some heat/sound mats on the floor which are glued in place that I calculate weigh just shy of 2.9 lbs total, based on a 1cm x 1cm sample I took and weighed, then ran the area calculations with. I'm not bothering with them because they are a bitch to scrape off.

The rest of the sound deadening in this car looked like pillows - plastic bags stuffed with some sort of matting that weighed next to nothing. These were squirreled away in various recesses of the car and easily removed.

[seckerich]

Have you tried the dry ice on the sound mats?

[Ron Earp]

Have you tried the dry ice on the sound mats?

I have not but might give it a go. Dry ice is available here and it'd be nice to get those pieces out, even though they don't weigh much at all.

[seckerich]

Makes for a cleaner interior. Put the ice in a big thick plastic bag and break it up with a dead blow hammer. Lets you get better contact with the surface. After you see frost on the underside hit the area with the dead blow softly to break it loose. It took 15 minutes to strip the entire RX8. If you have a lot of melt strips and liner to remove just go by the welding supply place and get a dewer of liquid nitrogen, it is really fast with that.

[Knestis]

A guy out in the NW built what he called the "death ray..."

http://www.rallyanarchy.com/phorum/read.php?5,6465,6493

K

[Ron Earp]

Thanks for the tips fellows because I'll have to go after that weight. No death ray is available but 25 lbs of dry ice I can get on the way home from work.

We were able to scale the car up tonight and see where we're at. I have to say we're better off than I thought we were, but not where we need to be.

We're essentially at 2510 lbs with the stock tank and about 12 gallons of gas. So I'd feel comfortable calling it 2440 lbs. There are still things left to remove - cruise control, some airbag crash sensors, and a few other odds and ends like comparing a fuel cell to the stock tank. But there is a lot to put back in - cage, race seat, harness, fire system, and other racing related items.

So in addition to those dampening pads, which isn't going to be fun, I'm going to need to attack the wiring harness and remove optional circuits that we can legally remove. There are a lot of them - ABS, anti theft, power windows/mirrors/locks, AC, and so on. The harnesses are very heavy. Tonight we spent time separating the metal from from the dash so we could get to the dash harness - just the dash harness weighed in at 9.7 lbs and the door harnesses were a bit over 1.5 lbs each. In this respect it would have been nice to have obtained a five speed manual non-power window non-ABS non-AC car that never had all the options, but the single example of that I found, which took almost a year, was in very poor shape. Ford quit make the stripper cars in 95 so if you're inclined to find one look for 1994 and 1995 models, after that they all had quite a bit of options regardless of trim. Anyhow, I'll need to be thinking about very light rear suspension components as well as a light ($$$$) seat.

I have to say I'm encouraged. I know we'll never make the 24XX spec weight but if we could score a 2700 lbs weight with driver I feel we could make the car competitive. I don't think it'll ever be one of the "cars to have" in ITS but I think it can be a contender and add some flavor to the class.