Guy's a few questions.

[jon_r]

1) Can anyone tell me how much a Williams would weigh with literally all the interior removed, carpets, panels, headlining etc etc - basically anything thats not essential?

2) Is Safety Devices the best company for a cage for the Mk1?

3) Total weight of car with said cage and 2 bucket seats?

Thanks for your help guys.

[Lunner]

Around 900kgs with 2 seats and not much else, maybe less fi you remove the dash, need to get mine weighed.

Safety devices are the vest, if they hadn't gone into liquidation, speak to mark about cages

[TriO`]

like lunner said about 900k


and i think the rollcages are about 30 kg but differnt designs obviously differ in weight

[Zollo]

I reckon you could get the weight down - if you took out absolutely everything you didn't need - to about 800-825 kilos. Then an average cage and a couple of light-weight seats would add about 45 kilos to that.

[Lunner]

There is no way in helly ou can take a further 50kgs out, there is only the dash left, unless you start taking body panals off

[richy]

yeah usually with no interior at all just dash there around 900kg, not much more to strip out then other then as said body panels etc or going for carbon fibre bonnet etc

[Mark_Ritchspeed]

The dash weighs very little at all as its such lightweight plastic, which is why I put mine back in.

Getting it down to 900 kgs should be quite do-able, but not so easily with a decent (ie substantial) cage in. My cage weighs 45kgs on its own, so you dont see the benefit in weight terms by removing all the interior.

There are lots of other items that can be removed to save weight, which althoug not a lot by themselves will add up to reasonable savings at the end.

There is around 5kgs of excess wiring that came out of mine and removing things like abs (if fitted) also make considerable savings.

Fitting the polycarbonate windows was another good weight saving.

800kgs would be do-able, but it would cost, noth in time and money.

If I removed all my extra "rally" bits (sump-gaurd, tank-gaurd, extinguishers, mudflaps, intercom, computer etc) the weight would be around the 900kgs mark. I know this, as I weighed everything that came out of the car and everything that went back on. This of course is assuming that the 980kgs listed weight is correct.

Oh, and for cages try and get a Safety Devices to save yourself a lot of work when fitting. In general, we usually charge more for fitting OMP and Sparco cages as they dont fit nearly as well as an SD item.

[jon_r]

Thank you guy's. Its just an idea i'm playing around with in my head at the moment.

Mark what sort of cost is involved in fitting the SD cage, does it work out a lot cheaper than a OMP one? I'd like to keep the dash, does either one fit around it, or does it require some cutting? Final question, how long would you require the car to fit one?

Thanks

Jon.

[Mark_Ritchspeed]

As a rough guide, we tend to base our fitting prices on however many point cage is how many hours we charge. i.e 6 point cage is 6 hours (£150 at our labour rate of £25 pr hr) and 17 point (like mine) will be around 17 hours.

My cage actually goes through the corners of the dash and tri-angulates onto the front struts and is very time consuming to fit.

All quotes are on a per car basis (like most places) and based on a pre-stripped interior. Obviously pulling out seats and carpets etc would up the labour time.

Some OMP and SParco cages actually fit quite well (but its not the norm), its just that every SD cage we have done has been a much better fit and requires less plates etc to fit it square. Other cage fitters will probably tell you the same.

On the other end of the scale, people like Custom Cages will design and fit a cage to your requirements , but will need your car for a few weeks and will cost a fair amount more than the off the shelf cages, but from the work I have seen of theirs its very good quality.

[jon_r]

Thank you Mark, I may well be in touch in the near future if everything goes to plan.