Weight Reduction: Removing Floor Sound Deadening
Last Updated: 18-08-03

Seats Removed, carpet still in place


Carpet removed from drivers side, and spongey layer of deadening removed from footwells


View of the passenger foot vent 'system' (which comprises of a lame plastic channel each side of the car, which joins the main vents in the dash at the bottom of the centre console) - basically, it really has gotta go!!!

Reducing the weight of the car is the easiest and cheapest way of making it faster. Of course, removing seats and all the trim is the most obvious way of doing this, but its amazing how much some of the little things can weigh.
For example, the floor sound deadening, which in my opinion doesnt do a great deal until you have lose items on the floor on the car which roll around and knock very loudly on the bare metal.
However, after stripping the floors bare, I fitted some thin and very light acoustic carpet to the floor to stop this - yep, I know I am not 100% hardcore - the hardcore members of MIGWEB run with a bare metal floor. I tried this for a while, but decided a little carpet wouldnt hurt.

So what are the reasons for butchering the innocent carpet and sound deadening?

- They arnt so innocent! - Over time (mainly due to a small leak somewhere) the first layer of matting (a loose soft material) has become completely waterlogged. This leads to a smell of damp, probably rust and makes all the matting weigh a hell of a lot!
- Stripping it all out allows inspection of the floor to see if it has rusted inside out, or outside in.
- Weight reduction. The matting all adds to the weight of the vehicle, and to be honest it doesnt seem to kill road noise much.

Basic method is easy:

1) Remove all seats, centre console (around handbrake), and any other trim which is in the way

2) Pull up carpet

3) Pull up moldy and wet soft matting, and relocate to a bin

4) With a heatgun and chisle heat and scrape off the tar matting to leave a nice clean floor

5) At this point it depends what you find. Maybe you will want to just clean off any left over adhesive. Maybe there is some surface rust to treat with Hammerite. Maybe things are serious and you need to weld in a new floor, or part floor :(

I basically found the drivers side was absolutely fine. The passenger side had a couple of rust spots coming through, but I will leave this for now, and maybe underseal the floor to minimise it coming through in the future.

I cant be sure how much weight was saved, but it was quite a few kilos for sure!

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