Continuing with the weight reduction from page two
Lots of room to pull a few nickle sized holes out of these brackets. Every little bit adds up and this is a totally hidden non structural bracket in these cars. It’s sole purpose to give your plastic sale panels a place to clip to, which can still happen so long as you leave the horizontal slot in place.With the weather stripping in place, even when the panel is off, no one would think much of the holes.Here is the corner bracket again, except with the weather stripping in place.If you pull this hatch panel down you’ll find a nice thick heavy metal bracket used for keeping the trunk closed.This is the metal bracket you are going to find behind the plastic panel. It’s beefy, if I remember correctly it weighs almost 2lbs and there is lots of room to take out some metalSo this is what my trunk release bracket looks like after I pumped if full of holes and took out a chunk of weight. Still plenty sturdy, and I am sure I could have taken out a tad more weight. Still the best part of this remains that if you look above 2 pictures to the hatch with the plastic panel attach, that’s still exactly what you see after you have done this. If you don’t tell anyone, no one would ever know.I don’t want to bore you with pictures of the interior that we all already know what it looks like, but I just want to add a quick few photo’s of the trunk area interior after all that metal was cut out. These are just to show that once you reinstall all your pieces, all that “hideous” weight reduction is hidden from sight.Quick shot of all panels loosely reinstalled. Notice the hatch bracket that holds the locking mechanism that was swiss-cheesed to the right? Looks pretty normal right?Last boring shot, the camaro cubby hole. Everything looks exactly as it came from the factory. Sorry for the boring pictures, I just want to emphasize to those people who think this might “ruin” their car, that it really doesn’t and what you’ve done can’t be seen
All in all I have been able to get quite a bit of weight out of the car this far. I am about 25% of the way to my goal of shaving 100lbs from the car. I have taken off 24.25lbs from the car through metal shavings.
***Just after these pictures were taken I had the car weighed and she sits at 3140lbs with no back seats in her and just under 3/4 tank of gas. This is also without me sitting in the car. I have since removed another 1.5lbs from the car. By the time I reach my set goal I should be at 3065lbs with no driver.
Winter has now hit us here in the North and depending on how cold it gets will determine how much more work I can do on the car over the winter.
