Well, there's plenty to remove from the car! All of the plasics. Gone. All of the carpet. Gone. Most of what's behind the dash - gone. The A/C parts. Gone. I did put back in the A/C evaporator "box", after I pulled out the guts of it - then, at least air can flow from the fan unit (far right box) through to the heater core unit (which is left in so in the case of rain I can still run the defroster, but without the compressor). Which, in the last pic is - er - gone! (aluminum repair to the undertray is easily visible where compressor mess once stood).
One thing I removed was the cross-brace under the dash. It was kinda interesting to see that. Looks kinda like a side-impact brace under the dash. I removed it because the cage will contain a "knee bar" that will run across under the dash from side to side. So the stock one is just basically adding weight. Not only that, but it's placement will cause problems for the installation of the real knee bar, so it really had to go. In the pic, you can see the sheet metal support for the steering wheel. This metal was braced against the removed cross-brace. The steering wheel can now be moved 1/2" in any direction laterally. Not good! I will rebrace it against the knee bar, so no worries.
By far, the most annoying, painful, and absolutely worse job was to remove the layers of tar stuff that is put on for sound deadening. The stuff is gooey when warm at all, and pretty damn sticky. Ick. So the plan was to make the stuff as cold as possible. I had heard with dry ice you can just break it with a hammer. Well, not quite. I froze a section with the dry ice (it makes everything within a 1' radius of the ice damn cold), then took the hammer to it. Parts that were not well glued down broke apart easily, but when I tried to hit too hard, I started to bend the sheet metal. Not good. So what was left, with the dry ice still on, I chiseled away. Lousy work. Total weight of all the crap was prolly 25-35 lbs. Not great, but it's gone. More valuable was the thick sheeting between the firewall and dash. When I removed the dash, you could get at all of it. That was weighed in at approx 40lbs total. Together, approx 75lbs. It adds up.
Once everything was cleaned out (including the trunk), it was time to put
things back into place.
The wiring harnesses were connected to what was left inside. The rest, left
to hang for now. Once the cage is in, I'll tie those up to the cage, or
perhaps remove the excess wire and re-tape it. You can see how little there is
now behind the dash.
Add a seat and some harnesses, and we're ready for the rollcage install. This
isn't the seat I'll be running. My S14 has a Sparco Pro2000 in it, that I'd
like to use in the racecar (it's pretty tight and holds you in well) - and to
replace it, I bought a Sparco Evo 2 (the Evo 2 is a bigger seat providing good
comfort with a little more room than the Pro2000 - so it'll be better for the
street).
Now all I have to do is spend another 16 hours making seat brackets for it. Ugh.
