Decent weight reducing body parts?
 

I'm not looking to buy yet, but more looking at my long-term options on body parts. I see tons of parts here from tons of vendors, but virtually none of them mention weight savings. I know a lot of our stock body pieces (hood, fenders, roof) are already pretty thin and lightweight from the factory, so it's probably pretty challenging to offer any decent savings.

Does anyone have a list of the aftermarket replacements that offer real weight reduction when painted?

how about your belly? do you have extra weight there? :D

http://www.the370z.com/brakes-suspen...on-thread.html

We have a decent start to a weight reduction thread going, just need more input from people when they buy stuff.

doesn't the AT weigh like 30-40lbs more than the MT? kinda off from the getgo...

you can start by removing the spare tire and all stereo stuff, get a dry cell. i'd swap out the fender and quarter to CF if that was really the direction you want to go.

basically take off everything you dont need like interior panels.

at the end of the day 100lbs in saving will net you about 0.1 sec if 0-60mph.

I could do 15 myself.:icon17:

I

IIRC the doors hood and hatch are aluminum? No need to buy expensive cf parts for those items if they're aluminum, imo.

Yeah, I could stand to drop around 15-20 there :p

Yeah these are the basic weight specs from the factory for 2009, AFAIK:

MT Base: 3232
MT Touring: 3278
AT Base: 3269
AT Touring: 3314

I'd rather not get into another 6MT vs 7AT debate here, that's totally not the point of this thread :P

I've already done most basic things ages ago, as you can see in my journal thread. I killed the washer fluid system, the spare tire, the subwoofer, the bluetooth stuff. Did the battery relocate to a tiny PC680 (AGM) in the trunk. Lighter wheel+tire setup. Lighter 2pc brake rotors and lighter seats are on my eventual to-do list.

I haven't compromised the interior much yet though, as it's still a semi-daily driver / road-tripper for now.

Eventually, someday, that might happen, when I pick up a new DD car and re-purpose this one to be a bit more dedicated. But there some things I can do ahead of time that don't compromise its current function, and that's what I've been shooting for where I can. I figured one of those would be body panels, but when I trawl through the threads in this section advertising body panels, tbh it looks like they're all about the flash and not the weight loss, because they're not advertising any comparative weights. :shakes head: If there's one or two of you sponsors/mfgs that are advertising weight drops, speak up here so I can find your thread in the haystack.

Yeah I've been following that since day 1, but we don't have any body parts listed there, and quite frankly I'd rather not be the test mule on figuring out aftermarket body part weights if the mfgs aren't giving us any data to base buying decisions on.

The point of this thread is basically to call out the 370Z after market body parts makers and ask: do you have reasonable weight-dropping pieces available at reasonable prices? What kind of weight drop can we get from painted FRP fenders, hoods, etc? Are the stock pieces so light it's just not worth bothering?

so how much weight has your car lost so far? 200lbs? 300lbs?

if so you went from a 0-60 time of say 5.4 to 5.1sec. hardly worth the effort on a street car imho.

if you're going to do it, do it like you mean it by making a track car. take out ALL the interior panels out and rest of your stereo, a/c everything. :)

Well, what's "worth the effort" is highly subjective. It's hard to be on these boards and not sound hypocritical saying that to anyone. Most regular humans would say it's not "worth the effort" to replace exhaust or intake systems for the gains they give either. That ship has long sailed, we're obviously all over-optimizing here.

0-60 isn't the whole game either, not by far. Dropping weight off the car also benefits handling, and redistributing the center of gravity towards the bottom and back can give pretty significant positive handling changes for fairly small moves. Hence the focus on the front body panels, rather than say the rear bumper or even the trunk lid so much. The battery move alone can be felt in the handling of the car, IMHO.

I'd love to build a track-specific car, more like TravisJB's build, but it's not in the cards right now. I don't have another car lined up as a replacement daily driver, and quite frankly with as few weekends as I could devote to the track right now it wouldn't really be worth it. I plan to keep this car pretty much indefinitely though, and someday it will get there :)

i agree that dropping weight does wonders for handling but you live in houston. ive lived in houston decades ago so i know what it's like. there's no such thing as canyons or any kind of serious curves you'd carve in your area unless you go to the track. so im guessing your primary goal is acceleration since your roads are flat and straight, and some braking benefit. :confused:

you see, ive been modding cars basically for street use for many years. after all the weight reduction and intake/exhaust forced induction mods, suspension, etc ive done, it comes down to this... most sport/sporty cars these days are built pretty damn well out of the box. especially for street it runs very well. you make changes to the car you sacrifice something else. unless you do dramatic sacrifice you're not going to gain much.

street cars you shouldn't have to sacrifice anything. :)

This is pretty much the philosophy Lotus is/was after. It's asking what you can do without. I would probably start with the seats and wheels (although the stock's are pretty light already). Body panel replacements will yield minimal results, but everything does add up.

The oem semi-dry carbon varis hood I have for sale is 6 lbs lighter than stock
and the one with vents is 5 lbs lighter, if you need weights of other items let me know and I can find out for you... but in terms of weight reduction the seats and interior are a good way to start :)

I drive all over TX, but even just here in Houston there are plenty of curves and corners, but they're generally brief violent affairs, not long sloping stuff. At speed some of the highways are a blast too. My favorite is the Woodlands Autobahn (aka Hardy Toll Road). Perfect pavement, and some really nice curves with pretty dramatic elevation changes in places too. Gotta hit it in the early AM on a weekend to find it relatively free of traffic though.

Some of it's just sacrificing some labor and dollars, it's not all an even tradeoff. I wouldn't characterize most of my tradeoffs as trading one performance aspect for another and netting roughly the same overall performance benefit.

There are lots of tweaks that can be made where it's just not worth it to the factory on labor and/or sticker markup to make certain small improvements. A lot of the decent tradeoffs are also just personal taste on performance vs noise, inconvenience, maintenance, and comfort/entertainment. The factory can't please everyone with the blend they pick there.

For some examples: I'm not willing to gut my radio/CD player completely. I do like having music in the car. But I can totally live without the subwoofer in the back, my music still sounds fine to me that way.

Or my recent addition of an oil catch can. The factory could have done that, it's all upside and no downside in terms of performance and engineering. The downside is in maintenance: they don't want to burden consumers with emptying out a catch can on a regular basis (or have the consumer face a blocked PCV system sucking liquid oil if they forget).

Better brake pads: possible noise issues, more brake dust on the wheels, more expense, etc. Washer fluid system: again it's just dead weight to me. I own a little squeegie to clean my windshield in my garage, and I don't mind doing it regularly when I stop at gas stations either. Good wipers and Rain-X work well enough for most everything else.

Smaller battery: all upside performance-wise. The downside is that while most normal car consumers pretty much never have to worry about their car's electrical system (so long as they don't leave the headlights on accidentally or whatever), I now have to consciously think about my charging/starting cycles (like, hey I just stopped and started the car 5 times without giving the alternator enough time to recharge from all that, so I guess I better leave the car running a while now).

You get the idea. The car is great out of the box, but it can be made a lot better if you're willing to sacrifice a little of your own time and convenience in areas that don't matter so much to you.

so going back to my earlier question, exactly how much weight did you remove? 200lbs? 300lbs? :confused:

Yeah that's what I was afraid of, that there wouldn't be really good weight savings on these parts. Not enough to justify the cost to me, personally, anyways.

Oh not even close yet. Last time I tallied everything up, I'm down about 105lbs in my normal configuration (and more lost in the front than the rear, and importantly some of the loss was rolling weight on the wheels+tires).

FI LTH's are coming in June which will drop another 17lbs up front. Seats will drop another another 23 or so lbs, that's the next major interior thing. Front 2-peice rotors will drop another 14lbs (rolling, unsprung) weight, not sure on the back, probably less, let's say 5. So that ballparks me around 165 lbs down once I get to that point in my progress.

After that, it really is mostly stuff you'd only do on a more dedicated vehicle: killing the radio, the A/C, all the interior plastic, extraneous wiring, etc, etc. I'm not doing any of that so long as I'm regularly driving the car on the street.

Edit: BTW, for ballpark referencing what weight reduction is worth, since our cars are in the ballpark of 10:1 weight:bhp ratio, I generally go by that. E.g. dropping 105lbs is worth about the same as adding 10 horsepower just in terms of raw acceleration potential. Of course that doesn't factor in any other benefits.

one thing that DOESNT make your 370z lighter is adding a Seibon TS hood. I immediately noted that this hood was at least a few pounds heavier than the stock one. It was noticable enough to detect just during lifting it for installation.

Wstar- sounds like a good start. :) I reduced about 10lbs from exhaust, 6lbs per corner (static) on my wheel/tire setup so I saved about 110lbs right there. :p everythig else about stock.

My first thought based on the thread title was "just chop off your left arm" :happydance:

Seriously though, the easiest way to drop weight is thru the exhaust components. FI claims 16lbs reduction by replacing the oem manifold and cats with LTH and a 17lbs reduction by replacing the CBE so that's pretty significant. I'm sure other aftermarket exhaust setups are pretty similar in weight savings too.

Not to be snarky, but the point of the thread was to ask about whether weight reducing body parts are available/feasible. As I've already pointed out repeatedly to other snarky responders, I've already gone through the rest and I'm well aware of their effects, and well on my way through getting them done where applicable...

Someone's feeling a bit sensitive...

Just pointing out what should be obvious. The thread has a title and a pretty clear set of objectives. Only one person actually responded with some factual information on the topic at hand, the rest is just ******** "question the questioner's motives and reasoning" crap (which I wouldn't mind so much if I didn't have to go back and point out what should be obvious from my journal thread, or even from the rest of this thread).

yah, the obvious is you apparently have tunnel vision and you do not realize that your objective and application is out of focus from the beginning... :ugh2: you should appreciate people taking the time to post valuable comments for you to understand what you're doing from 3rd person's view.

...and if i really wanted to put snark in my comment, which i didnt, i wouldve stated that i gained more total weight savings without really trying from my wheel/tire setup than you did with all your unsprung and spurng combinations.

:ugh2:

The thing is, the comments weren't really that valuable to me. I took the time to answer your questions, but I was already well aware of all the other ways to reduce weight that we have available. What I wanted out of this thread was for body parts mfgs to speak up about whether their products dropped any significant weight, or whether that was even feasible. One did respond, and I'll take silence on the rest as meaningful.

I never understood your comment above, your weight post seems to indicate you're equating 6lbs per corner on wheels and tires w/ 100lbs of weight drop? Is this based on some equivalence calculation? My 105 number is raw, as in, that's how much total weight I've dropped from the car, sprung/unsprung/rolling etc just tallied up in a simple sum.

:facepalm: GL to you.

Good luck with your trolling? :stirthepot:

Were you going to answer the question about 6x4 = 100? I've never seen One True Definitive answer on how to convert rotational and/or unsprung weight into some kind of equivalent in sprung weight.

First off, I'm going to admit I'm not the most helpful person when it comes to keeping track of the weights. Partly because I don't have an accurate scale but mostly I'm too excited to get the new parts on I forget to weigh them first. Luckily I still have all the shipping boxes and shipping weights so I can do the math. Anyhoo...

Nothing from any vendors? Bummer...

Since I am also very curious about shaving off some weight, especially the front I'll put this out there: the stock strut brace seems pretty light but I'd be curious to know how much a $2400 titanium one would be.

If you want an 11 lb exhaust (y-pipe ans single exit) you could do the titanium amuse r1000. Only $4k :p

I'm curious if you did a trade between narrow lighter wheels and wider one with more grip. I personally just went with the widest then tried to minimize the weight.

How about lightweight lug nuts? They'll help the unsprung mass but won't do much for rolling resistance. Rays short type are 17g each. 0.75 lbs for all 20 so ~2.25 loss compared to stock listed in RCZ's thread

:facepalm: wtf kill this thread already.

:icon18:

Belsavis: Yeah I'm using lighter lugs already, and the 2pc brake rotors are on the way, should be here late next week I think. I guess the timing is good, I can go crazy and kill whatever's left in my current rotors + pads this weekend at the bmw event and then swap in the new setup next week for a fresh start.

In the case of the available body parts and things like the Ti strut braces and exhausts, it's just not worth the $$ to me for the small weight drops. What I was hoping I would find from vendors in this thread was that they had reasonably-priced FRP (or similar) body parts that were significantly lighter than stock, but with the thin aluminum on our cars that doesn't seem realistic.

I will go ahead and close this thread, since it was so far off track already. I thought it would just die naturally, but here we are :icon17: