One thing to remember when looking into alternate materials for your floor pans is to consider the fact that floor pans offer a great deal of a cars structural strength. Think of a slam dunk on a fiberglass backboard and you can pretty well see why it is unadvisable to use anything but metal for your floor pan. Aluminum is a possibilty, but you must consider that it is still going take less good ole steel does. As for attachment bonding would be the favorable way to go about attaching softer material to a harder one. If you use a fastener that is harder than the fastened then the pan will begin to tear from the friction between it and the bolt. Another thing to consider about the Japanese import seen is that a lot of cars featured a not really being used for the purpose that we are looking to use our cars for, that is, real performance driving. If you cut holes in a unibody car's floor it's like an opened can of beer. While closed and one whole unit the can is very tough and resistant to being crushed. Pop the top ( your floor board hole) and the can crushes or flexes without much force.
I think that if you are looking to shed weight for performance sake, look into carbon or fiber rear fenders and decklid,lexan rear windows and maybe light weight running boards. I hypothesise that this would aid in evening out the weight bias to a noticable amount. A final word of caution when looking for inspiration is to be careful when looking at what is being done in Import mags. A lot of those cars would perform as well as my brother's '86 Montie Carlo lowrider. Let us never forget the great technical tome that many of these new generation Japanese enthusiast reference ( The Fast and the Furious part 1&2). They don't seem to realize that form should follow function and not the other way around. Good luck on your search, Ryan
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May 20th 2005, 18:53
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