In my quest to get ever more lightweight, I decided to ditch the folding third row seats.  I never once used them while owning the vehicle and thought I could actually make more room (vertically) by removing the deck.  I ended up using these write-ups as a starting point, so much respect goes to @jrgoffin and @MikeCallery of the Explorer Forums for them.

They extremely helpful.  Early on in my desire to remove those seats, I hadn’t been aware of the structural cross-member that is integral to the rigidity of the body the third rows seats use.  It would need to come out if I wanted the seats out…but how do I retain structural integrity? Well, after more research, turns out the x-brace from a PIU addresses that concern.  I won’t go into re-hashing all the steps written by @jrgoffin and @MikeCallery, but because I only care about weight reduction, I simply used the x-brace and not the rest of the PIU replacement decking or foam inserts.

I also wanted to integrate the fluid tank for my methanol kit into the setup, so this was a parallel project.

Since I’m not going to have third row seats anymore, no need for the Power Fold Seat Module (PFSM), this thing comes out.

And to clean up the install, the wire harness can be disconnected farther back as there are some connections that are no longer needed.

Also coming out was the third row seatbelts.  Not really necessary, but I wasn’t going to half-ass the job.  One dilemma was, when the belts come out, the slot that it comes out of in the rear plastic exposes the bare metal underneath.  It would bug me…so I covered it as well with some foam I had laying around:

And here is everything I pulled out of the car in a pile.

The x-brace comes in raw metal. It’s usually hidden under a deck, so no normal reason to beautify it:

But since I was going to leave it exposed, I decided I was going to powdercoat it.  However, before I get to that, I needed to figure a way to mount the bracket for the 10L methanol tank that Aquamist offers:

Here is what I was going to weld to the x-brace:

And here is the bracket bolted to that piece before I weld it to the x-brace:

I didn’t get a photo of the piece welded on, but here is the finished gloss powdercoated x-brace ready for mounting:

Here’s the bracket with the methanol pump installed:

All that stuff I put back in the rear area came to a weight of 18lbs.  So, at the end of the day, I still saved ~90lbs on this modification.  And I love how much more room there is…