Swiss cheeseing rear well
 

Can I swiss cheese the rear T top well with a hole saw? Any other sections of the floor that I can swiss cheese? What about the rear seat back area? Id like to lose a little weight on the car.

I wouldn't swiss cheese anything to the outside of the car, especially the rear seat back area. That's firewall protection from the gas tank.

If you're going to do it, just cut out the t-top well and make a flat sheet to enclose the hole. I will post some pics today of what we did on my car.

Good point about the protection from the tank. Thing about the rear well is that I still want to have the t-top storage. I figured swiss cheesing it would still leave some structural integrity to hold the T tops. I would of course find some type of thin material to cover the holes up to keep the exhaust fumes from entering the cabin.

Like this?

why would you do that to take 3 -12 lbs off back of car??????????? than like was said before, you would have to cover the holes with metal again, there,s other things in car that are heavier than what you would get out of there, ,go to lite wieght carpet [it you dont allready have it] and that will take out way more than you,ll get with a hole saw, and not depreciate the crap out of your car :D

I agree. The entire t-top well is only 12-13 lbs fwiw. Hole sawing might get you a couple. Take a shat before you race and save the headache. :D

light weight carpet is on order. Picked up a couple racing seats from a local guy. Already cut out and removed anything that I could easily get to. Battery relocated to teh trunk. Radio and all speakers gone. Rear seats and panels gone. AC partially removed already. Tackling the bumper supports and inner fender walls soon.

I gotta remove weight from other areas since I want to leave the airbags in. Im not too worried about resale value. The car isnt going anywhere. Besides, with 116K on the clock, and a cut up motor, shes not worth much anyway. But shes still my baby. Since the car has always been a budget car, removing weight is the cheapest way to go faster. Im not afraid to cut her up and patch with some thin gauge aluminum.

I removed a little over 90 pounds from putting tubs in my car and cutting out certain sections. Depends on how serious you are about lightening your car. A lot of people don't consider once your car goes faster you add weight to the rear anyways, parachute and mount, battery/batteries, bigger fuel pumps, water to air intercoolers, all that adds up, so I don't feel bad about dropping weight from the rear, besides when you lighten the front with k-members and brakes you drop a lot so it isn't like weight distribution is an issue, with 101" wheel base you can pretty much put any f-body on the bumper with enough power.

how much weight did you take out by removing that whole Ttop section and putting a flate plate there?

I think the t-top section alone was 14 pounds. Depending on the metal you use you could weld in stock thickness material, thin sheet metal or aluminum so the weight will vary. The sheet I used was 4 or 5 pounds, I removed mine for clearance more than weight reduction. I used thicker material because I set a speaker box on top of mine.

Like I said the T-top section is around 13 lbs. There is a section of metal bracketry for the stock gas tank mount that you can't cut out. If you go to a fuel cell and cut that out, the t-top well is about 15 lbs. The t-top plastic holders themselves are 2.6 lbs. So the area in general is 17.6 lbs not inlcluding carpet. A reasonable piece of steel that I could stand on (around .030) would be about 5lbs. You could probably get as low as .024 (same as most tubs) for 3-4 lbs but wouldn't hold much weight.

In the pic below, the .030 sheet I used to cover the t-top well all the way to the back seat was 12.6 lbs. I can stand on this piece. For reference, the stock metal immediately above the gas tank was around 15 lbs. So I knocked off about 32.6 lbs and added back 12.6, net of 20 lb loss. However, I am cutting a big hole out for my fuel cell which will be covered with an aluminum box and dzus fastened. That will cut 5lbs of steel out and add a couple with aluminum. So the loss should be right about 23lbs. The 8 gallon RCI plastic fuel cell I used is 13 lbs with metal straps. The stock 98 metal tank dry without sender was 23 lbs. So there is another 10 lbs right there. Benefits to this are the sump setup, moving weight more rear-ward, and being able to run less fuel (more weight).

It's actually not that difficult if you just cut the whole thing out and put a new flat sheet there.

And then if you want to open up a can of worms try cutting the humps out for the spare tire area and the sump on the drivers side. That is a PITA.

http://inlinethumb48.webshots.com/12...600x600Q85.jpg

That sure looks pretty nice.

Thx! It makes more room for groceries too!

lol!!!