Aero Mods

mith612 wrote: In reply to Shaun: Where do you get the coroplast? I wanna do an undertray on my NA miata as the stock one is kinda mangled and it seems like a fun project. I've also seen the rally guys use hdpe sheets, but that's more for impact protection than aero.

I found it by calling a printing shop that makes real estate and commercial sighs type signs and asked them where they bought their coroplast. They gave me a number and I drove over to the shop and one of the guys was a gearhead and heard me describing what i wanted it for to the receptionist so he let me make a (way) below minimum order purchase. I bought a couple 4' x 8' sheets for $20 each )I think). You could also wait until next Wednesday and take down a couple of big political signs since no politician or their rabid followers, republican, democrat, socialist, commie, tea, green, green tea, independent, whako or otherwise, ever bother to. Or so it seems.

In regards to the pickup trucks, has anyone done a test comparing the removal of the tail gate altogether to the other options? My dad would leave the gate off of his trucks to save weight until he needed to haul something since most of the time the truck was his DD.

Back to the camaro now. The camaro is deemed a 'bottom breather' from what I have been reading online, simply meaning it takes its radiator cooling air from under the bumper instead of through it. I want to block off any obstructions in the bumper to see if that helps my mpg, but I don't think running an air dam across the front edge of the bumper will bode well for summer driving. Sitting in traffic I see the temp gauge creep up to 210 in normal driving. Apparently that is normal operating temp for an LS1 but the first time I noticed I was freaking out thinking the car was going to overheat.

Would running an air dam from the radiator back be just as effective? I am thinking about grabbing some cheap garden edging and adding it to the stock air dam that hangs from the lower core/rad support and possibly down the pinch welds on the side of the car. Its a black car and sits low so it shouldn't be too noticeable.

Stock:

Highly Modified:

Sweet spoiler, but I don't think I'll be that hardcore

Middle Ground: (Grill Blocked, Fog lights blocked or mounted flush)

(Extened Air Dam)

(Rocker Dams?)

For the truck tailgate - I'd be interested in the effects of these:

My father in law has one on his big Dodge. I don't think fuel economy was the goal.

If you want to close off the bed without the hassles of a rigid 'glass top, get a Truxedo or one of the other soft roll-ups. They're awesome - stuff is easily covered and hidden, but if you need to put something taller in the bed they quickly go out of the way.

For a Cummins, though, I'd look at improving the efficiency of the engine first. That's where the big gains are.

I just picked up a Ram 2500 with the big 6.7 Cummins, not that I've been looking into this recently or anything

I did a test to see if extending the air dam out to the sides would help, and got a bump of 1.8mpg on the highway. Puts me over 30mpg in a big, fat, V8 camaro, not bad.

Why oh why did I not open this thread sooner? I've been contemplating trying out something to get some better mileage out of my rx8 (not replacing the engine with a V8, though that would work worlds better) and my old van. I have low hopes for getting much more out of the 8, as i think the mazda engineers spend plenty of time with their better educated and less distractable minds getting the best out of that, but my van is nearly entirely engineered to be terrible, so it shouldn't be tough to get a little more out of that. The whole underbody is like a series of wind brakes, I could probobly drop about 500 lbs just cleaning it out (I suppose i don't need 3 tool boxes...) and taking off the over sized hitch, which is also a wind brake... I'd like to try that coroplast stuff...

If there are any election days signs left snap them up, free coroplast. Thanks MotoIQ.

I will be on the lookout for one of the really big ones and couple small ones. Doing some aero modding to the saturn this weekend...maybe.

im gonna try the garden edging on my mini van..

Rducing air flow through the engine compartment seems to be an important factor. The ECO model cars some makers have come out with use grille blockers etc. Plus LRR tires.

4cylndrfury wrote: As far as adding a rear diffuser to the underside of your bumper, is the difference really worth the effort? I drive a sedan, and have been thinking about adding something like the first pic on this thread, as well as a trunk lip spoiler to help reduce drag that sedan bodies make. Whats my best bang for the buck that doesnt make me look like a F&F fan gone wild?

Consider this:

When Honda did the 92-95 Civic VX (the high efficiency model) they made a little rear bumper diffuser that filled in the gap between the rear wheel and the lower edge of the rear bumper. If Honda's engineers thought it did something...

I actually have an extra one sitting in my garage.

I just took a look at the civic vx diffuser to see if I could add something similar to my camaro, and to my surprise the factory seems to have done a pretty good job already. Down the center of the car at least. Behind the tires and above the tips can be improved.

In reply to Platinum90: "Proof" and Myth Busters don't belong in the same sentence. As entertainment, I enjoy watching, in much the same way that I enjoy watching "How It's made". Part of the enjoyment comes from shouting "BULLE36 M3" when I see an error, which is just about every episode. I think they do it on purpose, like Craiglist sellers who use ghetto-speak or bad grammar and spelling in an attempt to get your attention by looking stupid.

it's entertainment

They don't get paid for being right, they get paid for making you watch.

Raze wrote: besides all the 'standard' mods, how bout the dimpled body?

The reason that this works is that the roughness of the surface is sort of proportional to the drag - except there is a place for some shapes and bodies at a specific roughness at which the drag dramatically drops. Weird, and I am not sure why, but it does. This is why golf balls are dimpled. The difficult thing is knowing how rough to make the surface, and it's velocity based, so each part of the car would have to be dimpled differently and it would all be data driven. You're talking an iterative problem that might outlast 30 car bodies before you got it right. It would work though, and would absolutely reduce the drag.

barnca wrote: im gonna try the garden edging on my mini van..

Post back with some pics. I may try it too. I have a 900 mile trip coming up with my '99 Venture.