Cleaning/Lightening Session One
With Hannah off performing maid of honor-type wedding dress moral support duties, I had an afternoon to tear into the car. It had been drying in the garage for a few days, and the disturbing stench had not yet abated, so it was time to dig in.
First step: out came the seats. The car is a 93 LE, so it has all the fancy schmancy leather options and headrest speakers, so the seats were not light (36 and 39 lbs), in addition to vast quantities of free spare change. With the seats out, a cornucopia of delightful things were revealed unto the world. Davin, you are a dirty dirty man. Half an hour later, I’d managed to vacuum the 10 square feet of carpet mostly clean, and recovered around 4$ of spare change, and probably accidentally vacuumed up almost that much again.
Next step: off with the soft top. The top had been pushed through at the base of the rear window, so it wasn’t doing a very good job of sealing the car. Having secured the broken (but sealed) hard top from my rolled Spec Miata car, I no longer had any need to keep the top on it anymore, and so it was time to see what the car was actually going to weigh. Off it came, revealing a soaking wet carpet and insulation layer, so out came all the removable carpeting from the rear deck and behind the seats to hang up to dry. By the time I finished weighing the car, the puddle under one of the pieces had spread to a river flowing under the garage door. I think I found most of the smell (I hope). Time to let the car continue to dry out for another few days.
After that, I did some little stuff: pulled the A/C expansion chamber box from under the dash, pulled the airbag sensor next to the horn in the engine bay, and then completely emptied out the trunk, which yielded another plethora of oddities (including a few dollars more coins and a pair of warmups).
Not a bad haul for a couple hours of tooling around. Hannah got home, so I decided to call it quits for the day. The next steps are going to be a lot lower yield, and require removal of the entire dash (removal of radio/airbag wires from the loom) and probably parts of the engine bay, so I’ll hold off on that for another weekend day with Brian and beer. The moment of truth had arrived — it was time to weigh the car. Time to see where we were at.
The corner weights are going to need some serious work. Not surprisingly, without the soft top and the seats (all of the rear weight) and with a nearly empty gas tank, we’re at 55 frontward weight bias. Fortunately, most of the remaining weight removal is going to focus on the front half of the car, so we’ll chip away at it. I realized that was without the steering wheel, so taking into account swapping to the final race wheels/tires and the steering wheel, we’re at 2006 lbs. This gives us a good starting place for continuing to remove weight for the inevitable weight gain from the supercharger. Our final min weight is going to be around 2050 lbs, plus or minus a few pounds, depending on final displacement.
A bunch of parts are on the way, but the most important parts are the Megasquirt and the 99 motor, which are both around 2 weeks out. When those get here in early December, I can get the car running on the full 99 setup and see where we really sit on weight and bias, since I can tear out the current AFM-based intake tract, among other things. Until then, I’m just going to be working on little weight saving things and gathering random parts on the shelf as they show up.
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