Weight reduction

[Drakon21]

I’d like my 2 door 24 sport to be as light as possible. As there any ways to easily reduce weight? I know there’s trading out the Steel wheels for some alloy, removing the rear seat. Anything else you guys know about?

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[JEEP4U]

Add Aluminum stubby bumpers, forged aluminum wheels, half doors, soft top, manual trans, manual windows & locks....... manual everything

rear spare delete

 

[jjvincent]

Take the roof off, remove the passenger seat, all carpeting and sound deadening. A carbon fiber driveshaft would help and then a set of floating rotors with aluminum hats. Titanium exhaust is another way to reduce weight. If it's a manual, a 5.5" triple disk Tilton setup will reduce the weight too.

 

[Philly_]

Plastic and Aluminum are going to be your friend here, and I'd essentially remove or modify any parts possible.

I'm not sure if the Sports have power seats, but I am willing to bet that the electric motor weighs more than the manual mechanism on older JL's. See if you can source one or swap with someone here, or go aftermarket.

A lot of extra weight comes from the tires, if you're going up in size, try to stay with C load. I think the BFG KO2 is one of, if not the lightest 35" and 37" AT's on the market.

Bestop makes full fabric doors that are SUPER light and can be split into half doors, but not amazing quality. I would go with those, or doorless, and avoid the factory soft top. The JK's used to have frameless options and those were far lighter. The new soft tops are amazing, but those mechanisms don't shed much weight over the hard top. Topless would obviously be lightest

Drop the factory muffler, chop any exhaust you don't need, and find a smaller, lighter replacement, or go without (not sure if you want to keep things street legal).

As mentioned above, eliminate any carpet/insulation that's not necessary. Doesn't weigh much to begin with, but hood insulation, hard top insulation, engine covers, floor mats, etc.

If running with no spare, I'd also ditche the factory jack and lug wrench. You'll need to call for a tow truck anyways, so no sense carrying the extra weight.

If you have a subwoofer, you could also eliminate that... I wouldn't gut my roll cage speakers, but hey, weight is weight!

Depending on driveline and your application, you could eliminate the aux battery and swap the main to lithium (antigravity makes some that are compatible with Jeeps).

Heck, while you're at it, you could eliminate the tailgate all together.

Remove the trailer hitch (if you have one).

If you're upgrading suspension, Artec makes aluminum control arms that would be lighter than an upgraded alternative, but might not be lighter than stock. Stock arms are light as heck.

This is everything I could think of... for now.

 

[GATORB8]

@Tredsdert is the resident expert

 

[AcesandEights]

Helium?

 

[Deleted User 38384]

I’d like my 2 door 24 sport to be as light as possible. As there any ways to easily reduce weight? I know there’s trading out the Steel wheels for some alloy, removing the rear seat. Anything else you guys know about?

My post here is basically me thinking out loud as I talk into my phone. So if you want the explanation behind all the things I list at the bottom, feel free to read em, otherwise the TL;DR is that the bottom for you in bold.


Whether you have the steel or the plastic bumpers, they're not the actual bumpers. The bumpers that you see on the Wrangler that you think, "oh those are the bumpers!" They're not, there in fact the bumper covers. The bumpers themselves sit underneath the bumper covers which you see in either plastic or metal from the factory.

If you got steel bumpers from the factory, you can save yourself quite a bit of weight by removing those and just exposing the actual bumper themselves. If you have the plastics covers, you got a little bit less weight reduction but still better than nothing.

Remove all the trim, except for the dash area and maybe the doors. But all those little plastic pieces surrounding your roll cage and such and the cargo area, completely unnecessary. If you add it all up you probably have about another 20 30 lb right there in just plastic alone.

Carpets! Surprisingly enough the carpets weigh a lot! Put them in your garage, throw them away, whatever your whim, get rid of em.

Spare tire. Your spare tire weighs about 80 lb. Leave it at home, you don't need it anyways, unless of course you're heading out to the country and there's not going to be a automotive store on every other corner or AAA willing to come out to you.


Let's see what we have so far...

Remove the bumper covers
Remove all the plastic trim
Remove the carpets
Remove the spare tire

If it's not too cold where you live, you can actually remove the tailgate as well. I ran without tailgate for quite a bit of time myself. Tailgate probably weighs about 35 45 lb max.

If you go without a top, depending whether it's soft top or hard top you could save some weight. I don't know about hard top weights But I know the soft tops about 30 lb give or take.

So we got...

Remove the bumper covers
Remove all the plastic trim
Remove the carpets
Remove the spare tire
Remove tailgate
Remove hard / soft top

Depending what state you live in, you don't need doors as long as you have side mirrors and a rear view mirror. So get rid of them dang doors. If you wanted a door, but you didn't want the weight of the doors, you could go with soft doors. I believe each of the front doors is like 45 lb, and then the rear doors are 25 lb each. So with soft doors you're looking at about 15 lb total for all four doors. Now that I think about it, you said you have a two-door so you'd be going from about 90 lb to about probably 7 or 8 lb total for two soft doors.

That's all I got for now, if I think of something else later I'll let you know.

Oh yeah, depending what state you're in you don't need fender flares. They are fender flares, not fenders. You have fenders already and I believe in most states you have to have fenders, but fender flares are cosmetic thing, you don't need those in most states that I know of.

I've been running without sway bars end links for the last year and a half, and recently just took off the whole sway bar entirely because why have the extra weight when I'm not going to use it.

So I guess let's get a all inclusive list here while I'm at it...

Remove the bumper covers
Remove all the plastic trim
Remove the carpets
Remove the spare tire
Remove tailgate
Remove hard / soft top
Remove doors / replace with soft doors
Remove fender flares (check your state's laws)
Remove sway bar (might want to get comfortable with the body roll before you start driving on highways and such)

If you're looking for a way to run your Wrangler long-term you could probably mix and match some of these.

 

[2nd 392]

Every unsprung lb is worth a good 3 lbs of sprung weight. Get the lightest tires and forged wheels in your wanted size.

 

[Drakon21]

Thanks for all the input! I think my first big thing will be getting rid of the steel wheels for some good looking and light forged ones.

 

[2nd 392]

Thanks for all the input! I think my first big thing will be getting rid of the steel wheels for some good looking and light forged ones.

Unfortunately the selection is limited, I have been looking. Also not inexpensive

 

[ganshert]

My steel wheels are 28lbs, a lot of alloys won't be lighter

 

[ganshert]

Love the plan to lighten, will be listening in!

muffler delete

 

[Old Jeeper]

I’d like my 2 door 24 sport to be as light as possible. As there any ways to easily reduce weight? I know there’s trading out the Steel wheels for some alloy, removing the rear seat. Anything else you guys know about?

I take a different approach. I don't care that much about weight, what I care about is WEIGHT DISTRUBUTION.

I wheel a lot and I wheel more often than not alone.

Spare tire, make sure its in good shape and full of air. That said I hae only needed my spare once in all the years I wheeled. Better to have and NOT need than to not have and need!

Yes you can call a wrecker: Figure on about $2000+++++ and just wait till you need to be extracted from a wedge at the bottom of a canyon and that helicopter will cost about $11k ++++++

Bikini Top only unless its winter wheeling

Strip interior and have it LINE-X'd

Remove all but the drivers seat.

They are making a lot of Aluminum plates for the under carriage. I am not keen on that for various reasons, prime of which is it affects the CoG on your Jeep. In fact it raises it which is the last thing you want if your cup of tea is ROCKS! If not then don't worry about it.

Weight distrubution for those who play in the ROCKS: What you need to do is see if you can find a set of Individual scales x 4 to weigh your Jeep. If you find 4, then drive to the nearst CAT Scale ( Truck stops) and weight you front and rear wheels. Your target is: +/- 25 lbs at front and rear.

Jeep is good at weight distrubution so it did not take me a lot of get it within 15lbs +/- at each corner....

 

[Jeep Wick]

Thanks for all the input! I think my first big thing will be getting rid of the steel wheels for some good looking and light forged ones.

Spare delete and muffler delete (Dynomax) are the easiest things to do. The wheels and tires next, as someone said unsprung weight makes a huge difference. I've read as much as 10x weight reduction. The rear seat is pretty heavy but I don't know if you use it. If you have a hard top get the soft, it's lighter.

 

[Powelligator]

Looking above at Jeep Wick's avatar... Getting rid of the key fob alone might help tremendously.

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