From door to floor

First job of the day,

repeat the work done on the previous blog, which was to replace the glass with plastic on the offside rear door, by doing the same for the nearside rear door. But the breakdown of actions was covered in the previous blog so we won't repeat that here.

The rubber gloves have arrived! This is an essential bit of kit for handling electricity with your hands. If in doubt don't go near electricity when it is dangerous, especially with your hands.

Time to continue with pulling away the trim, the trim is almost exclusively held on by the same poppers as we've seen before, with just the occasional screw fixing being encountered today.

We are now venturing into the front of the car. Mats and trim are vacating the car.

Beneath the carpet are various pieces of polystyrene.

We're not going to remove the carpet without removing the front seats and surrounding trim, to remove the seats it's just 4 screws and a couple of electric clips underneath. The screws can be accessed by moving the seat fully forward and backward.

There are airbags in the front seats. You have to be super careful when going anywhere near airbags, it's best not to go there unless you know what you're doing. One of the precautions we made was to disconnect the 12V battery and wait a while to allow for any residual electricity to go away.

After unbolting the passenger seat, the bottom clips were unclipped and the seat lifted out.

It's not just the front seats and the trim holding the carpets in, the center console is over it. Again this is poppers and screws.

There are actually no plans to put the console back, although some of the switch gear needs to be retained, so we shall take what's needed from the bezel and fabricate something.

What we have revealed appears to be the airbag controller module.

Take a good look at the carpet while it's still there.

These guys don't mess about.

These bystanders watch on, voicing their opinions.

Back in the car the carpet is out and the final bit's of floor trim and polystyrene are coming out.

Weight savings

We are actually going to include both front seats even though the driver one will go back in temporarily until we get a lighter one:

2 x head rests 1980g
Trim 4300g

Polystyrene 882g

Carpet 4600g

Console 3413g

Mats 907g

Passenger seat 16700g

Driver seat 17600g

Sub-total: 50.4kg

Added to the previous 63.0kg

Total: 113.4kg

Just to put it into perspective, that is the weight of an adult dolphin.

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