The 370Z Weight Reduction Thread

[ZoroItaliano]

Originally Posted by wstar

Also, I can report now that the electric tape and plastic conduit material in the car's wiring harnesses adds up to approximately 443 lbs of messy, sticky, crap. At least, it feels like that as you pull it all apart

So saving weight in the muffler location is not recommended?

[synolimit]

Originally Posted by ZoroItaliano

So saving weight in the muffler location is not recommended?

I say remove whatever, whenever. If you have coilovers you're better off since you can corner balance some of the weight around. If you don't have them the track feel will be effected but at least for a DD you're not lugging so much weight around and saving on gas. I'm at least averaging around 23-24mpg city and highway.

[wstar]

I bought one of those Evo2 batteries referenced earlier btw. Planning to stick it back in the stock battery box, once I figure out some mounting and wiring solutions.

[ChipsWithDips]

Originally Posted by wstar

I bought one of those Evo2 batteries referenced earlier btw. Planning to stick it back in the stock battery box, once I figure out some mounting and wiring solutions.

Just gonna copy and paste this from a PM I responded to a while ago asking about my setup:

The mounting was a bit of a pain for me, I don't do a lot of fabrication like that, but I was able to make a new battery tray out of stainless steel sheet metal and foam that the battery was packed in and zip ties. Its hard to explain, heh. Here is a small photo album, it duplicated some of the pics for some reason Ballistic Performance EVO2 16cell battery in 370Z - Imgur

Another issue I didn't realize until after I had made the new tray was that there is a white plastic wiring conduit that goes under the battery tray, but it actually sits higher than the mounting points for the tray. The stock tray has bumps where it mounts so that it can clear this piece. I ended up just throwing some little wood shims under my tray so I could clear that which you can just see poking out in the pic.

I had to extend the battery cables since the battery sits so much lower and the stock cables don't have a lot of slack. I got cables from this guy and they are really great quality for the price I think.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/6-AWG-Custom...:X:RTQ:US:1123
I got one foot each of red and black wire in 6awg, with 1/4" terminal lugs.

[theDreamer]

I stopped by wstar's place and saw the battery...holy cr@p is it light and tiny.
Minus it being an odd shape, it is light enough to throw like a baseball.

[Kingbaby]

^^^

Are you refferring to the battery chipswithdips posted ? Also did you guys buy the tender aswell...

[ChipsWithDips]

Originally Posted by Kingbaby

^^^

Are you refferring to the battery chipswithdips posted ? Also did you guys buy the tender aswell...

I don't use a tender, I just don't run any electrical when my engine is off and it hasn't been an issue. I was concerned when I got this that the battery would need to be balance charged, but after checking the individual cell voltages every so often, they have amazingly stayed balanced within a couple millivolts without any special treatment

I just went and measured the voltages again:
3.342V
3.341V
3.340V
3.341V

Can't get much closer than that. This is after daily use for nearly 6 months now.

[wstar]

Originally Posted by Kingbaby

^^^

Are you refferring to the battery chipswithdips posted ? Also did you guys buy the tender aswell...

Yes (and thanks for the install pics Chips, it helps!). I went ahead and got their little digital balance charger too, because the car spends a fair amount of time shut off between events or during electrical work, and it's not impossible that I'll sometimes have battery drain going on as well just from shoddy temporary work or mfg issues (last time, it was my datalogger was draining the battery when it was "off", if I didn't physically disconnect it from car power).

I haven't gotten around to testing it in my car (waiting until I finish the other electrical work), but from what I've seen so far of the specs and the battery itself, I think it'll work great in my car, but keep in mind my car's electrical system is pretty minimal at this point (I've gutted over half of the factory wiring harness - no a/c, no radio, no airbag system, etc). It's probably borderline on a stock car unless you're very diligent about not draining it with the engine off, and/or putting a trickle charger on it all the time.

[synolimit]

Here's mine....


Decided to do a lightweight battery. Went with a etx15l which is basically a odyssey pc680, 11lbs. I highly doubt the Braille p2015 puts out what it says it puts out and everyone says Deka makes the brallies anyways. I ran that battery here in ohio for 2 years without issue. Also if you look at Dekas sheets, every ETX battery you find will have identical specs at any store with the same part number! I ended up buying a etx15l from autozone with a Duralast sticker on it.

I had to do a little work to get it to fit right but I had all the stuff so no big deal. I replaced the OEM tray with a lightweight 1/8th peice of aluminium, made 2 paper thin steel tubes to increase the height so the terminals would be at OEM height, and had to buy 2 steel cylinders so the OEM rings had something to fit around as a terminal. The etx batteries don't come with the right kind of terminal top like the OEM battery has. Last I relocated the negative ground wire which worked out perfect because there was a bracket there with the same size holes. Just a simple bolt down. The bracket was holding 2 relays so I just zip tied them to some wires.

All in all I'd guess I saved around 22lbs.

[Kingbaby]

Thanks alot ChipsWithDips & Wstar.....my car only moves on fridays night and maybe a early morning sunday morning run, then it's stagnant for another 5-6 days.

[synolimit]

Originally Posted by Kingbaby

Thanks alot ChipsWithDips & Wstar.....my car only moves on fridays night and maybe a early morning sunday morning run, then it's stagnant for another 5-6 days.

Why?! Dear lord drive it! I'd be the only millionaire with 150,000 miles Avenrador for crying out loud.

[mwhit02]

well, now that I removed all the rear hatch interior plastic panels, I decided to look around the underside of the rear-end to see what's what. I had no idea the tow hook piece was so heavy. I'm not saying a weighs a ton, but it's a lot heavier than I thought it would be:

[wstar]

On a more-serious note about the wiring: I did put a big chunk of the removed harness stuff from the front half of my car in a plastic trash bag and weigh it. My bag came out to 16 pounds. This was most of the removed wire itself + electric tape, some of the small plastic modules for the key sensors and TPMS sensor, some of the conduit. It includes all the wiring up there for things like keyfob sensors, tpms, interior lighting, mirror, everything in the doors, and the airbag system (but no actual parts other than those dinky tpms/key receivers, just wire+tape+conduit and a few whole plastic wire-to-wire connectors where I wasn't using any circuits running through them). Doesn't include the stuff from the rear hatch area that I had unwired months ago and tossed.

It's probably closer to 20 lbs since I left out some conduit and threw away some things before I started saving them to weight later, but on the other hand I'll be putting back a little bit of tape and conduit, too, so 16 lbs might be a decent approximation of a net figure for the wiring conversion in the front. I could roughly guestimate that the rear half would've been more like 8 lbs (again just for wire/tape).

Worth it for the time investment for weight alone? Hell no, it's hard work. But if you're disconnecting all those accessories and circuits anyways, it's nice to have the car cleaner and simpler, and make it easier to diagnose other issues, etc. Most of the harness runs just get thinner, but notably at this level of stripping accessory circuits, the *entire* harnesses that run down the outer passenger edge and down the center console from front to rear get removed. Those all run needless accessory stuff. The necessary stuff in the rear (tail lights and a couple little circuits to the diff area and the evap canister) all run through the wiring harness on the outer edge of the driver's side.

[critical]

not going to be totally accurate but i did assemble two front shocks/springs today so i got out the bathroom scale.

OEM Front Shock/Spring assembled ~10lbs
OEM Rear Shocks ~6lbs
OEM Rear Spring ~5.5lbs

[wstar]

So I got the Evo2 16-cell installed and tested. Bottom line is it works great, just as ChipsWithDips said it would. Install/test info here: wstar's Journal . It's really a much nicer solution than relocating a heavier battery. As with all minimal battery solutions, I wouldn't recommend it (or at least, would recommend caution) on a regular street car where you might run the stereo or the lights for a while with the engine off. Especially with this battery, since the manual specifically states that if you drain an LiFePo4 battery below a certain critical voltage the (rather expensive!) battery is basically toast and can't be recharged.