Guest Anonymous Posted March 6, 2000 Share Posted March 6, 2000 Has anybody ever cut out the inner ply of the unibody to save weight? Since my spaceframe will be taking the full stress of all mechanical systems the unibody feature will just be making more weight. I'd like to get rid of that inner skin and weld tabs to the inside of the outer skin to connect to the frame. One problem I can see with this is that attaching the interior plastic panels will be a pain. Does anybody have an educated guess about whether taking out the inner metal would save enough weight to justify such a drastic alterization???? If I'm looking at saving only 20 lbs than forget it!! It would only be worth it if I would be looking at a 50 lb weight saving or more (I doubt it would be too much more though). Thought...Comments...Ridicule...???? SpencZ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pparaska Posted March 7, 2000 Share Posted March 7, 2000 This is how I'd estimate it: Assume a 22 gage thickness (I don't have the decimal thickness handy, but it's less than a 1/16, I'm pretty sure. Then do some measuring of the amount of area you would be removing (use rectangular and triangular areas, I'd bet) much like you would do if your were paving the structure with a coarse Finite Element grid and get a total assumed area. (I think SpencZ is a mechanical engineering student so he knows what this means). But for those of you who don't, you would break up the interior areas using large adjacent rectangles and triangles, and then add up all the areas. Mass(lbm) = [.284 (lbm/in^3)]*[thickness (in.)][interior area (in.^2)] My guess is that you have less than 10 square feet (1440 in^2). So that'd be about a 25 lbs for the assumed 1/16" thick interior panels. There are some areas that are doubled up steel also, but I doubt that would add even 10 lbs. A V8 MG guy once told me his little V8 MG (chrome bumper) weighed over 2800 lbs with the AL Rover(Buick) V8. He knew what I was doing and said, "Yeah, those Z's are boxes of air." Very apropos. Personally, I doubt it's worth it. I'd only do it after the cage was welded in, so the body wouldn't crumple without the double walled shell. Regards, ------------------ Pete Paraska - 73 540Z - Marathon Z Project - pparaska@tidalwave.net">pparaska@tidalwave.net - Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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