Time to find out what my car weighs..

Update: My 2000 GT convertible weighs in at 3460 lbs!

Front axle: 1980 lbs.

Back axle: 1480 lbs.
The 2000 GT on the scales

The bad news is the weight distribution of this car is (as expected) pretty horrible at 57% front / 43% rear. The good news is that the swap should vastly affect this distribution — I’m hoping to reduce the front end weight by as much as 300 lbs (and add about 50 to the rear), which would change this to somewhere around 52/48 (much better weight distribution) — I’ll weigh it again and we’ll see how close I was.

Now for the sad news: I thought I could easily build a cantilever scale.

Purchased a tension scale that can handle 450 lbs off of amazon, and then attempted to use some ramps and some ingenuity to build a cantilever scale in the hopes of getting some usable numbers like the ones above.

Except that my first attempts at this have all been pretty sorry on the accuracy front — plus, (and this is kind of important), I had no reference data to determine if my numbers (even if I thought they were good) were even in the ballpark of what the car weighs.

A ways back, one of my friends (Dustin, you’re the man) suggested I simply take the car to a truck scale and get it weighed. I really tossed this idea (and I shouldn’t have) because I wanted something I could use, repeatably, to track the progress of each modification. But it’s sound, anyway, because as it turns out, I need to know if my scale is accurate anyway — and if I don’t have reference data, I can’t know this.

I think I may finally be onto a good mechanism for the scale (and will of course, publish this data as soon as I can), but in the mean time, I’m taking Dustin’s advice, and taking the car to a truck scale before I start the project. I’ll simply have to experiment a bit along the way with the toy mechanism — and hopefully before I’m done with the project, have something to share.

I’m still waiting on the fuel system for the car — not that it’s holding me up.

Steady as she goes!

-=FeriCyde=-

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