I've worked on a few first gens in my day, but never once gone through the PIA of removing as much weight as I could. We ditched roughly 30 lbs of interior parts just from the stuff we could unbolt, etc... ditched stock seats and went ahead and start on the floors.. I would estimate out of all the bags, etc we dumped from the interior, plus the seats...we have probably ditched 50 to 85 lbs... at least. With the cage going in and myself w/ a sparco speed...it'll more than even out, but oh well..



Not as much progress as I was hoping due to the hellacious tar. WTF...I've done FCs before and they weren't so much a pain..i think since this car sat outside so much it got a lot of moisture, etc and caused the tar to become even worse!



Here are some update pics..





BTW, thanks again to everybody who helped this weekend, had four of us on the car almost all weekend..it was good..





Thanks again for the rollback T!





First set is just of us picking up the car... Levi was teaching the FB how to heal...

Actually, the old dog wouldn't learn new tricks... it knows how to play dead pretty well though!





Got the car to levi's shop...i ran to errands while the others got into it..



A few hours later, and Tony wasn't getting distraught and decided it would be more fun to play with his big red hammer...

Got later, moved the car into the shop... sorry miata! We were forced to move levi's CSP miata outside,lol..lucky for me it didnt hail...





Here's a shot of the engine bay..lets just say, its rough..but believe it or not, the motor wasn't siezed and SEEMS to have compression, oil still looked decent and had no water in it..I may be able to get this stocker to run again (it has 134K on the motor)....



Also, the two slackers standing there decided to watch me work for a while,lol...

Got most the tar up, started sanding prepping, cleaning, etc... tearing out wires that weren't needed, blah blah..

Last shots for the weekend, took too long to go through the car. We did finish up the interior, but didn't get around to mounting the seat..we want to run some weld on the stock seat mounts to make sure they hold, etc.



I ended up running some truck bed liner in the place where the storage bins were and the hatch area, sprayed it white so it would match, but i want to be able to throw my gear back there and not scratch everything up too much...





Another shot of "shop" ...Levi's sweet CSP miata, T's project "ugly" gray hatch... the rally beater was somewhere around there... and of course my own version of the project "ugly", the FB.



We got the engine degreased, cleaned the entire car. It actually helped the car a LOT just to simply be degreased and hosed down. The doors opened and shut perfectly, door handles weren't sticking, etc...



I expect to get the body work at least started next weekend, so much for the three week project...but still, should be able to race in July or sooner...

http://www.grannysspeedshop.com/



second link from the bottom is a nice set of lexan windows, my buddy got them and they fit nicely

I can get it through mazdacomp, but since i also plan to auto-x this car I cant swap glass as it'll really start messing w/ my rules and classes...



I want to drag the car some, but i'm starting to gear it more towards auto-x or solo ..that way if my FC breaks, I can run the FB and still get my points, etc...

secret to the tar, is dry ice....

Yea i know... we used dry ice on the rally car AFTER we did the FB. The guy wasn't open, so yea... instead of coming off in 2x2 chunks..it came out in like 8x8 chunks...

neato

Even with dry ice on a 40 degree day (doesn't get much colder any more) mine came out in 4x4 chunks, and the sheetmetal still shows where the hammer fell.

Anybody weigh that crap after you get it out? Is it that heavy?

We weighed as much stuff as we could...



The tar by itself was probably about 10lbs... we ditched about 70-80lbs total from the interior thus far...maybe more since we havent weighed the stock seats yet...

Mine's in the 30-40lb range, and I still have some in the hatch area to get rid of.

Wow, I am surprised that it had that much. Was that out of the GSL-SE?

40lbs seems a stretch, but it may depend on year/make/model.. i think i was low on my estimate...i talked to some of the guys helping me, we're gonna go w/ 25lbs of tar total...

Well, dry ice is great, but living in Canada has it's upsides, it was like 28 degrees F and it took me 30 minutes start to finish, in the FC, I would say that it's close to 50lbs, that includes the tar, and the fabric sound deadning crap.

The FCs have less tar from my experiences too...