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New Carbon Fiber Doors and Lexan windows for the Track Car

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TSiAWD666

Supporting Vendor
2,648
899
Aug 15, 2003
Herndon, Virginia
I just had installed some new carbon fiber doors and mirrors along with lexan windows on my track car. I figured some folks might find information about it useful so here I am sharing. Pardon the picture quality but I was snapping things quickly as I had to get the car to another shop for other work, and it seems I had some crap on the phone's lens :)

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The doors are from Advan Carbon in CA. They are the only place I could find selling doors for our cars (other than a certain less than reputable vendor here who I won't name). I called them up, they answered all my questions and were very nice, and after I paid they had them shipped out in two business days, and arriving to the east coast in four. Very awesome company and service. Not cheap though... $1400 + $150 shipping. Ouch!

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Now the doors were built to replace OEM doors, so they had the skeleton for speakers and things, but I had that cut out as much as possible to save weight. Doing so made the doors fairly flimsy but still functional. The door fitment, per my body guys, was really crappy. Initially they were way too far forward and all sorts of oriented funny. They had to remove the door hinges from the car and slot them in various ways to kind of get them to fit. In the end the rear lower corner is pushed outwards just a bit and that can't be fixed without lots of body work. On my car it's not a big deal as my aero body panels kinda mask it (and it's a race car after all) so it's good enough. Other than that issue they are pretty nice, with great finish, consistency in the carbon fiber (which you can't see since I painted over it), and a nice oem-like skeleton. Oh, they are fairly light in at about the 18lbs. range as delivered (much lighter now, but we didn't measure them after cutting everything and installing the door handles/latch). The OEM doors with windows are crazy heavy, maybe like 80lbs? total guess but they are really heavy :)

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I had them come up with a pull cable door release to replace the oem interior door handle since I didn't want to keep all that (I would have had to keep a lot more of the skeleton for it to work). They used cable running through fuel line piping that is riveted behind the upper edge of the fiberglass door frame, and looped around and crimped, with I think rubber hose over the cable loop. It's really slick and works perfectly!

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The mirrors are APR's Formula GT3 universal set. They install fairly easily to the oem mount with some widening of some mounting holes. Originally I was going to mount them to the doors like Andrew Brilliant does on his car, but my body guys were very wary of the thin door skins supporting them and these mount points ended up looking ok. The mirrors give you barely any vision on the sides but at least they give some :) The passenger side is slightly obscured by the OEM mounting triangle panels but it's about 90% still in view from my driver's seat. Keep in mind my driver's seat is much lower and further back than an OEM one though so don't use these comments to guide your installation.

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The original plan was to use Angry Aero's mirror delete panels to fill the void of the removed OEM mirrors, but since we put the new mirrors in the same area we used the Angry Aero mirror delete panels underneath. So about these mirror deletes.... I'm sorry but they are absolute shit. They are shaped ABS covered in carbon fiber vinyl. They are not cut to shape to fill the void of the oem mirrors like they should be. We will be yanking these and just painting some lexan on a later visit. What a waste of $80 (I think that's what I paid). Now for a drag car that doesn't care about nice fitment and just wants something yeah, these do the job, but not an $80 job.

So while the car is now a trailer queen most of the time, I wanted to make sure for transport I had some windows in place that were removable for the track, but also for when I need to drive the car a short distance for something (because loading/unloading a trailer is a PITA for a 5 mile trip). So I asked them to come up with removable windows. I had originally asked them to explore doing what many race car guys do which is use the OEM window with a large U-shaped bracket so that the window sits on the door frame, and can just be slide upwards and out when removing. Since I was going to drive too I asked that we be able to secure them, like with dzus fasteners or something. Here's an example of what I had thought would work:

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Well once the body guys dug into it we found the fiberglass frame was way too flimsy for the OEM glass and we had to come up with something else. I picked up some Home Depot Racing Lexan ($100 for a huge sheet), some Car Quest Racing fuel line, and some aluminum rivets, and I'll be damned but they built me some nice removable lexan windows :) Before:

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After:
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They used the fuel line as framing material, and riveted the lexan to it. Now they didn't do exactly as I asked which was to heat the lexan and form it to the OEM window shape, but they don't think it would have helped much because of how thin the lexan was (HDR didn't really have thicker). As they are they fall a bit concave when sitting on the car but they do their job so I think I'll let that go. As you can see they shaped the lexan nicely, even smoothing over the edges, and gave it a nice painted border. They are held in by nuts that go over two studs epoxied to the inside door skin. The lexan has two holes cut that go over the studs. By forming everything just right and screwing on the nuts to hold the lexan into place I get just enough pressure on the door frame to keep water out. They do kind of sag when the door is opened but who cares. The system requires just a little adjustment when reinstalling the windows but it only takes maybe a minute so it works pretty well. It'll do.

Well, I'm not sure what else to share so feel free to ask any questions. My first race with this is Apr 26/27 so we'll see how they hold up :) I still gotta get the numbers/class/sponsor stickers back on the door along with a bunch of other crap so it's a mad scramble, but at least this particular project looks to be done :)
 
So much win here...

Sub'd :hellyeah:
 
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Kinda sad I didn't get a sneak peak before you posted this :p (j/k!)


Looks pretty awesome! Saving that much weight is a good feeling, and that's a pretty slick design to have removable windows. I was wondering if you went down this road after looking at the first picture since you need to run with windows down/out on the track. Interested to see how it's held on and what the removal process is like next time we meet up.
 
Niceee..Im About to cut up my oem doors n do lexan..any close up pics of the window? Did the use a jigzaw to cut the lexan? I used the lexan knife for the sunroof but it was hard to getthe corners right.. looks great those oem doors are silly heavy

the home depot stuff is thin you could see it flexing over 70mph
 
I'm not sure what I could show you with close ups of a clear material. What sort of close-ups are you thinking about? I can't take pictures now anyway as the car is at another shop until late Friday.

I'm not sure what they used to cut it but I am stopping by the body shop later today to pick up my car and some parts so I'll ask then.
 
Sure, when I get the car back I'll try to do that.

I forgot one thing about the install. Drain holes were cut in the bottom of the door frames to allow water to drain out. I have no idea if those are in the stock doors or not but it's definitely needed in these as water can easily just slip by the window and into the door.

Also, I went and picked up the original oem doors last night. I said they were 80lbs-ish in my original post because that's what my body guy said as a guesstimate, but I thought he was talking about just both doors combined. After handling them myself I realize I misunderstood him and I would say that 80lbs. estimate is EASILY for ONE door, and that's with no glass, no door panel, and no speaker. These oem doors are insanely heavy!!
 
why not get reverse carbon doors(fiberglass skin,carbon frame). door would be a bit stronger even though its gutted.



They are 87# each, the ones with the electric windows.
is that full weight(panel,glass,etc..) or just with glass and speaker?
 
Pipnorcali, here's a shot of the studs. They are epoxied on the skin near the top and use some I think M8 nuts.

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why not get reverse carbon doors(fiberglass skin,carbon frame). door would be a bit stronger even though its gutted.

In that case you might as well just go completely carbon fiber. However I think you might not realize not all carbon fiber is the same. This stuff is commercial grade stuff, very flimsy as its layed up wet, probably not vacuum bagged, and definitely not put in an autoclave. This stuff sucks but it sort of looks like what racecars use. However it's cheap relatively speaking. If you were going to have someone use this cf for the skeleton it's going to probably be just as flimsy, or marginally stiffer.

I would have just got all fiberglass doors if they were commercially available since I knew they'd be about the same strength, but they weren't available, so "carbon fiber" it was. I know my car looks expensive but I'm still have a budget.
 
I would have just got all fiberglass doors if they were commercially available since I knew they'd be about the same strength, but they weren't available, so "carbon fiber" it was. I know my car looks expensive but I'm still have a budget.

they were available,i got mine(reverse carbon) from gtfab years ago when he first made them. the only issue was the price. it was the same for the carbon /f.glass doors, full carbon was more $$$ and all f.glass was cheaper.
 
Those doors should be less than 18#, maybe 10 or 12, was any foam placed where the hinges go, if not that is the reason why they are flimsy, also if it was not it will eventually crack at the hinges.

The stock door gutted and with the guard removed and cut around the inside perimeter is 18# which was still too heavy for me, my driver side is 7# and the pass. side skin, non functional is 3#.

Wish I had the time to give you more tips.
 
I appreciate the insight Arrowhead but I'm not sure the hinge area has anything to do with the flimsy nature of the doors. The doors are able to rotate around the horizontal axis towards the rear end. So imagine the rear upper and lower corners able to move ever so slightly in and out if you use your hands to torque them. The hinge area is solid and I'm not clear how it could be related.

As for hinge structural integrity to make sure they don't crack over time, perhaps some foam might be a good idea to help reinforce the area and I can bring that up with the body shop when I bring the car back for some other things. Right now the hinges look to be rivnuts through the fiberglass shell, and on the inside they are epoxied around the rivnuts with structural epoxy.

Pretty incredible you can get the stock door to 18 lbs. I never imagined those things could go that low. Something to keep in mind for other folks looking at lighter weight as that's vastly cheaper to do :)
 
I always reinforce that area and also the opposite end where the locking mechanism goes whether I use the original latch or a homemade one and the foam I bring it around 3in on the top and bottom. Also I use flat washers against the glass where the bolts go thru.

What type of hinges are you using, the stock ones or other type.

This is what I have been using and they work good,I dont know how to link, but this is the info on them.

Stanley National Hardware

CD1055 chain 2C, bolt 3in zinc plated, at Amazon.

I am now trying another one, simpler and cheaper, but still under testing.
 
It'd be lighter if it didn't have license plates on it! Looks great John! I just skimmed the post while I'm at work but have you done the hatch yet?

I take the plates off when I'm racing.

No cf hatch as of now. Hatch is a much lower priority as the weight loss is on the wrong end of the car. Also it's going to be very expensive because it will require a change to the wing mounting (since I won't be able to mount to the hatch anymore). I have no immediate plans to do this as these doors, the roll cage, my trailer and the tow vehicle were my big budget items for the year.
 
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