If you’re converting a normal street car into road course terror – be it as a track day car or a full-fledged racer – weight reduction is one of the key components of the transformation. The initial ways to reduce mass are obvious – toss the rear seats, use lighter wheels, ditch the AC compressor and plumbing, etc. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find another weight-adding feature of most any street car – sound deadening.
Yet unlike seats and other mechanical components, sound deadening can’t just be unbolted to its attachment point – this stuff is stuck on with industrial-strength glue (a bit of trivia – that glue is where “new car smell” comes from), so it’s nowhere near as easy to remove.
There’s a few different ways to approach the task, but there are pitfalls to each.
Scraping with a traditional scraper takes a long time and it’s very labor intensive, while using an air scraper, as the gents in the video can attest, has the potential to punch holes in the sheet metal.
Heating with a torch is also an option, but that causes a big, sticky mess as the glue liquefies and adds another layer of difficultly to the task.
In this clip we learn that there’s another option that’s far easier – dry ice. Combined with rubbing alcohol, they toss a bucket of dry ice into the car. Since dry ice is solidified carbon dioxide, its freezing temperature is far lower than normal ice (about negative 110 degrees Fahrenheit), so handling the stuff does take some caution. But the results speak for themselves when the material starts to come off in massive, solidified chunks. See for yourself in the clip above.