I think my friend may have gone a little overboard with stripping the interior of his prelude.
He cut out the sections I circled in the picture. Does anyone know if this will affect the rigidity and structure of the body at all? Or if it is dangerous in any other way?

 

I'm no expert on stress points in a prelude frame, but that does not look very good at all. He could very well bend the frame putting stress when taking a corner. I'd tell him to start welding in a cage.

 

anyone else?

 

I would ask a body shop or some collision place. One question: All this for an automatic car??

 

Is he racing it or whats he have planned?

 

It will be raced and driven on the street quite a bit. We are doing a manual swap soon btw.

 

what a waste......

 

Live and learn.... we all start somewhere...

All that aside, the question you want answered is going to take a person who knows the stress points in a prelude.... probably not too many walking around other than the designers or a REALLY studied body guy.

 

Wow he might of saved 5 lbs. doing that. HAHA whatanidiot

 

if the sheetmetal was there...it was there for a reason. just tossing extra metal into a mass produced body only hurts the manufacturer's bottom dollar.

Just look at that area. now the only thing there is the roof and the floor. with a quarter glass and flimsy *** outer shell.

he's gonna put that car into a position one day where the stress will overcome one of those points and that car is gonna crumble in that area.

 

It will be fine. I had way way more than just that section cut out of my car and never had any problems.

 

<TABLE WIDTH="90%" CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0 ALIGN=CENTER><TR><TD>Quote, originally posted by stackz &raquo;</TD></TR><TR><TD CLASS="quote">if the sheetmetal was there...it was there for a reason. just tossing extra metal into a mass produced body only hurts the manufacturer's bottom dollar. </TD></TR></TABLE>

While that may be the case here, that's not always true. The metal may have been there for tooling reasons. Sometimes it's cheaper to minimize trimming steps by leaving a piece intact instead of trying to save material. Plus it's sheet metal, they're paying for that chunk of material whether it's in the car or not. You buy it by the unpressed sheet, not the pound.

whether or not that portion was supporting a stress, I can't tell you. I'd need to see it in place to even guess.

I can tell you, as a mechanical engineer, I'd be very hesitant to remove portions of the structure of a unibody car without a cage. And I'd insist the cage already be in the car before I even thought about cutting.