groar's 1997 Megane Modding Thread

[groar]

Sorry for late reply : far too much free time nowadays...

Originally Posted by Istas

What is the opacity test?

The only ecological test mandatory during all technical tests. It measures the opacity of emissions. The unit is in m^-1, so the smaller the better, but I never found the exact description of this test.

Nifty idea with the battery and solar panel, too. Hope it brings you net savings.

I have to confess that I'm doing it for the high geek level of this mod which will permit me to say that I have a solar hybrid
The panel I have is only a 13W and as it's an amorphous panel it will quickly loose 20% of power and is very sensible to heat. If it can generate 40Wh/day it will be a lot and in winter it will be even worse. All this energy correspond to very few gas, even by considering the alternator efficiency is low.

The cost of the panel was rather low and I have a spare (old) car battery. Another reason is that I don't think the plug's fuse is strong enough for me to plug my computer : when I do wardriving it can last several hours but the computer battery can't. All year long I'll be able to use the battery to feed the (GPS) navigator and the rear view camera (I should be using as the internal mirror through the uglyback).

Originally Posted by PaleMelanesian

Looks to me like the rear wheel skirts give the biggest improvement.

This is also what my butt-o-meter told me last summer with my cardboard skirts and why I wanted to build coroplast skirts since. It also took me 2 weeks to get used to the new behavior of the car when I installed them.

Originally Posted by cfg83

I keep imagining the perfect hill with the perfect slope with the super-long flat straight road at the bottom with NOBODY around for miles and miles and miles.

Since 2 years a road was being build to permit to avoid that several tens of thousand vehicles go through my city everyday. This road is opened since yesterday morning and it seams that several places have a constant slope. I'll try to verify that with my GPS receptor, but I'll have to go into holidays before
Even if this new road has a perfect shape, I'll certainly avoid it for my daily commute as it's too fast and the old road is now a desert.

Denis.

[groar]

Originally Posted by groar

I have a lot of respect for all coast down testers (Darrin and all). After this experience I have even more respect. Before doing CDT with the uglyback, I'll try to find another road and a light-to-no traffic moment.

I wanted to talk about every people spending a lot of time to make studies, measures and data analysis, coast down and any other test.

As I said, it took me a lot of time :

• 30 minutes to drive enough to heat the car. I drove 30 miles as the road I wanted to use was too hilly and I got the wrong road to go to the one I used.
• 15 minutes for each test
• between 5 and 20 minutes between tests : stop the GPS recording, change the configuration, take a few notes and restart the recording.
• 20 minutes to drive home.

The total was 2h30. I would have liked to test the uglyback, but I need half an hour to tape it and I had only 2h available. Oops, I spent more time than I had It seams that in the precipitation I installed a skirt less tightly than the other one so I'll have to reinstall it. If I can do other tests soon then I'll make C & D test again before doing E (D + uglyback).

About the length of the road, I simply measured it by accelerating to 110km/h and coasting to 70km/h. I was happy as at 110km/h the aero effect is important so it should be able to show a smaller difference, while I'm mainly driving at 70-80 km/h. But during last tests the road was too short and I had to break before reaching the 70km/h.
From a quick calculation, the coast down used 1.3km (0.8mi) and the acceleration (from a stop) around 0.8km (0.5mi).

I used an USB GPS receiver plugged to a computer to record my coordinates (lat, lon & alt). The GPS receiver generates a coordinate every second and it timestamps each one at micro-second. With each coordinate is also indicated the speed and the heading.

Of course I can't have the exact time at which I was exactly at 110, 100...70 km/h, so for each speed during each coast I estimated the moment by (simple linear) interpolation of time and speed between the last entry over the speed and the first entry under the speed.

Denis.

[groar]

A quick update before leaving for nowhere land during 2 weeks.

Here are some pictures taken from the inside of the car when the uglyback was on :

• The direct view :
• The view through the mirror :

So you understand I brought the small "rear view camera set" shown in next message.

But the uglyback had a great pro : it prevents the sun to heat the car through the rear glass

Denis.

[groar]

Here is the first test of the rear view camera :

• Installed under the upper part of the ugglyback :
• while the monitor is installed on the rear mirror :

Here is the second test of the cam :

• Installed on the passenger mirror :
• while the monitor in installed vertically on the rear mirror :

Two points :

• The angle is very wide. The pro is that you can see much more than with usual mirror. The cons is that you can't estimate the distances. In fact anything you can see well in the monitor is too closed to you.
• The brightness is automatic, which is great when you go under a bridge per example. But this will be impacted by the angle to which you put the camera. Downward and you get what I feel the best picture, but the angle makes the picture very complicated to analyze. More upward and the cars look a little bit closer to you (but always too far) but then the sky makes the road side of the picture too dark.

Even without the uglyback, I kept the cam to get used to it, but it will be difficult...

Yes I live near the pink city (Toulouse), but this isn't the reason why the trees are pink. I don't know if this is the low quality of the camera (I bought the lowest cost one while all the other one were 50% more expensive) or if it's because the first time I connected it its fuse died...

Denis.

[Jetta90GL]

Originally Posted by groar

Yes I live near the pink city (Toulouse), but this isn't the reason why the trees are pink. I don't know if this is the low quality of the camera (I bought the lowest cost one while all the other one were 50% more expensive) or if it's because the first time I connected it its fuse died...

Denis.

The trees showing the wrong color is caused by the camera lens not having an IR(Infrared light) cut filter. They usually delete that so you can have some low light vision at night, and also allows for the use of IR illumination.

[orange4boy]

Love the uglyback!

Good job on all the testing!

[cfg83]

groar -

Like the cameras. Getting steampunk-road warriror-ish. Makes me want to put magnets on computer chips and plaster them to my car's body :



CarloSW2

[groar]

Thanks for thanks

As after a few weeks the convex part of the uglyback went concave, I removed it. The fact the angle of vision was far too narrow IMHO, didn't saved it when I took the decision to remove it.

At beginning of year, I build a simple trunk extension (the lower part), quickly followed by a trunk cover (the upper part) as I previously described it in this thread.

• Here is the result from the rear :

• The result from the side :

• and when the trunk is open :

I have no test result to present except the fact my butt-o-meter tells me the car accelerate more easily

As I have to keep the trunk functional, I have to keep the uglycover not too close to the rear windshield. I tested it at speeds up to 140km/h (87mph) and it resisted without moving too much due to air perturbations.

Denis.

[groar]

• With the uglyback, I offered two uglyteethes to Megane with a little extension at the lower part of the lower grill block :

• Today I retaped the uglyteeth to make the inner hole bigger to permit Megane to not heat with late spring temps :

As you can see, at central hole and exterior sides of the lower grill block, the 2 teethes have been move toward exterior.
By looking at these pictures, I realize that the lower extension is now much higher than before

• And here is a a picture where the 2 right wheels are aligned :

Have fun,

Denis.

[Piwoslaw]

Hi Groar, good to see you back
Is the trunk cover a new piece of coroplast or is the uglyback reincarnated?
Was there a noticible difference in coasting/handling right after removing the uglyback? Did the wheelskirts stay on all winter?