[Varn]

You really have a way with coroplast Tony. Your bicycle always was one of the best super street bikes out there. Do you still have the chain drive steering.

I don't know exactly why I am getting better VW FE except that I did make a coroplast bubble on the hood and moved my coroplast grill block out to the front of the bumper. Had a lot of folks say that it doesn't help much if at all. Guess I should take it back off and if I am lucky my mileage would drop. Actually I have been getting avg of 49 for the last 1400 miles. I would be screaming up and down if I were getting 57.

I am not an engineer and don't do enough trials. I did add 2" to the stock spoiler and the mileage went down 2 mpg from my last fill. I know the wind was higher as spring is comming on. I am tempted to remove it. Perhaps it is adding frontal area and drag. I can't come to grips with having a lower body panel. I'm 60 now and don't like crawling underneath. I'd like to just cut loose and get a Tourag v10, let it shift itself and go like a billygoat in the snow.

I have a lot of carbon fiber in my shop and didn't have to purchase it specifically for the mini van project. I had it on all winter and didn't have any issues with it. I used probably 18-20oz of cloth. I got the idea from a tv show where they were stretching cloth to make speaker enclosures for punk cars. I thought that it might be a good way of making an aerodynamic shape. I used some 9 ga wire from some old election signs and reinforced them a bit, sewed on some cloth by hand shrunk it with a heat gun and spray glued on the carbon (any composite would do). Painted on the epoxy and once cured peeled it apart. If you make some wire frames up that fit your car well I can make them in carbon for you. I used some pop rivets to hold them on.

I really haven't figured out a way to get the smooth contour for a tail box. I think I want to use this technique. I was thinking that I might make it in sections and then turn them over so that the slope goes the right way.

[dreammode] Maybe having the concave areas at the front of the tail box might make shape like some of those laminar flow shapes like the weaver liner. [/dreammode]

The newer Jetta has a cd of .3 and my older one .36 Assuming a similar frontal area they have 20% less aero drag and a more efficient engine to boot. No wonder they break 50 pretty easily.