After smacking the guardrail last summer at Wichita, losing the hood at Tulsa plus 5 years of misc. scratches it's time to do some bodywork and repaint the Nova. I had gotten used to running it all banged up, ugly sure but it's a race car right? When we took the car to Tulsa at the last test n' tune in November and was backing it out of the trailer a little boy was standing there. I was told he pointed at the car and said "Oweeeee" - lol, that helped me make my mind up it was time to repaint it!
So, before we send the car off to the body shop for it's beauty treatment there are a number of things I want to get done first. One of those items on the list is to lighten the front fenders as much as I can. Our rules in MAKO Ten Five do not allow fiberglass fenders, so in order to save a few more pounds off the front end I'm going to do some trimming.
To start off I weighed one of the fenders to measure how much we've saved. The stock fender, with no trim and no marker lights, fasteners, etc. "Stripped" weighs 25.590 lbs as measured with my nitrous bottle scales.
I'm going to be removing the inner lip that the hood springs mounted to, and the lip the inner fenderwells attached at, and depending on how much energy I have left, drill some lightening holes where ever it looks like a safe place.
Check back to see the progress!
Success!
I got more out of the fender than I initially thought I would.. Initial weight was 25.59 lbs, after removing the hood spring mount pieces, trimming the fender lip, removing the lip where the inner fender bolts on the front half, and drilling about a dozen lightening holes I ended up at 19.060 lbs, a savings of 6.53 lbs per side!
At this point I really don't see where I could get much more than a few more ounces out of it, unless I removed the rear brace completely. I thought about that one a while, if I removed it I would have to add a support for the fender to keep it from flopping around more than likely, which would very likely be a wash weight wise. So I'm going to stop here and be happy to have found 13.06 lbs of weight reduction for basically free!