razzele

Ive driven it twice on the motorway for over 100 miles in the wet. First time the screen was a little dirty and it misted up. Second time it was scrupulously clean with that polish and didnt mist up, that was a hot humid thunderstorm night.

What MB is saying would make a lot of sense. Also id consider a roof vent for your hardtop when the vents go. It gets pretty hot in there over summer time, especially the left leg.

dave.irl

Ok, I'm mostly convinced now. I'll check if its required for the local car test and if not (which I doubt), and if not, I'll pull the heater matrix from the car over the weekend. I wonder could you install a small fan somewhere in the ducting somewhere and fix it to blow at the windscreen, in lieu of the heater and existing blower

dave.irl

I guess I could pull the roof in that case, The advantages of a hardtop. Its not a hardcore track machine, nor am I a hardcore drivers, so running sans roof if I cannot take the heat won't be a problem.

dave.irl

So yesterday I pulled the dash and the HVAC system as earlier suggested. Here is what all the parts are like out of the car



and the empty dash



I weighed the parts. If anyone is interested

Blower fan = 1.16 kg
Heater core = 3.55
Evaporator core = 4.04 of which the rad is ~ 2kgs
Assorted piping and foam that came out was 1.59kgs

So about 10.5 kgs + the weight of the coolant.

Since I want to retain airflow to the windows, what I am going to do is to keep the blower and the unit its attached too (without the aircon evaporator rad), remove the heater core completely and the vents under that dash, and using some flexable ducting, run a duct from the blower to the intake of the vent that blows air over the windscreen.

This is about 3.5kg, so still a reasonable weight loss ( ~8 ). And I retain stock fan controls and recirculation controls too

Also if anyone is thinking of doing this, the ECU needs to be unbolted and it uses 3 triangular lobed bolts for which I don't have a tool to remove. So I cut the lower two off with a die grinder. There is plenty of room to do this. You cannot get the the upper bolt, so the simple solution is to look for 2 10mm bolts which hold the bracket at the top of ecu to the chassis. These can be easily got at with a universal joint, and will be release the ecu. Replace the bolts with standard hex bots and your done. 15 minutes or so it took me

Also since I took them off, here are the weights of other components

Passenger airbag 2.95kgs + support bracket (0.6kgs)
Driver airbag 1.13
Guage cluster 0.82kgs
CLuster surround 1.05
Dashboard ~5.5-6kgs, My scales only go to 5kgs and this went over, by feel compared to heater, this would be my guess

rednikos

have anyone got carbon doors?the oem weight 28kg and the carbon 5kg

razzele

the doors are stupidly heavy.

Nabu

Their price is also stupidly expensive unfortunately!

razzele

Also carbon doors are possibly not road legal, I think if fitted with adequate door bars can be used on track though.

s2konroids

Are you going to weigh this when you are done?

dave.irl

Yes, I need to get in touch with an acquaintance with corner weight scales, so I'll get an accurate weight. Not sure when though. Also I'm painting the car this weekend by myself which will be fun...