More little jobs

- April 8 -

I made up a little aeroscreen - this was a bit of a token effort, just so that I can get a feel for the workability of polycarbonate, and so that I can see what happens to the airflow at motorway speeds

General SVA fixes

- April 27 -

I had a stroke of inspiration for the aeroscreen - I drilled a 5mm hole near the edge of some scrap steel plate, then chopped off the edge of the plate so that only half the hole was left. This device I called a scraper, and I scraped it along the edge of the aeroscreen. Result? A 5mm radius edge along the edge of the aeroscreen - no need for trim. I was so pleased that I even wet and dryed and polished the edge to make it look nice, even though I'm ditching it for a proper aeroscreen as soon as I can

Template

- April 9 -

Wheels on, I dropped the car to the ground and made up an aeroscreen template, in the ubiquitous blue corrugated plastic. The standard one is a little lower than I want, and doesn't extend far enough back along the sides of the car. It's also made of SVA friendly 5mm thick plastic, which means it isn't going to be very easy easy to bend around the cage. I'm keen to avoid cutting the screen around the cage, as rain will inevitably find its way along the edge of the cut (and it'll look rubbish), so I'm going to use 2mm polycarbonate to make the new bigger aeroscreen from.

Making an aeroscreen

- April 25 -

Spent a couple of hours today cutting and forming a polycarbonate aeroscreen, but it didn't go very well. I wanted to have one that went wrapped round the outside of the cage and back along the sides of the tub, but 2 things conspired against me. One is that the template and the polycarbonate bend differently around the cage, which affects the shape quite a lot - ultimately meaning that the polycarbonate wouldn't go where I wanted, or needed it too. The other fundamental problem was that the flange to which the standard aeroscreen mounts is at a much shallower angle than the cage, leading to a large wedge shaped gap between where the aeroscreen should be, and where it ends up being.

I expect that given time and proper heating and bending factilities a nice job could be done, but I've not got any of these things, so I quit the garage resolved to try something simpler the next day

Making a simpler aeroscreen

- April 26 -

It is the aforementioned next day, and I've done a simpler aeroscreen. It mounts to the flange and only extends as far as the cage. Time will show how good it is at actually deflecting air...

The picture is a bit rubbish 'cos the aeroscreen is clear, but :

This page last updated on: Sunday, Jul 16 2006