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Old 08-12-2011, 12:00 PM   #16 (permalink)
orbywan
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lunarhighway View Post
looking at the last pictures it seems dams in front of the rear wheels might be a good idea too., given their size, perhaps half a bucket would be an easy way to go about it.

get a cheap black cement bucket, cut it in half and remove the bottom, and you have two curved black dams that you can attach with L blrackets to the undetray.

perhaps something similar can work for the front tires at well.

but i like what you've done so far!
When time permits I'm going to build some wheel fairings for the rear duallies and eventually for the front also. I just bought a copy of Hucho's book on aerodynamics and so far have been disappointed that it doesn't go into more details about the three things I am the most interested in at this point, which is front air dams, belly pans and especially wheel turbulence.

I say so far because I've barely scratched the surface so maybe the info is there and I haven't found it. Don't get me wrong, I think it's an awesome book.

I'm going to construct some wheel fairings using Three Wheelers construction technique, which is fiberglass over foam. I think that's the only way I'll effectively achieve the shapes I want to build. Hucho's book says the air at the rear wheels is coming at each wheel set at about a 15 degree angle from the middle. That's throwing an interesting curve ball in there, not sure what I'll do about that.

I think wheel turbulence on dually vehicles is considerable and so far somewhat ignored so I'm looking forward to that part of the build. I've incorporated mounting points on the pans in the back so I can build 'clip on' wheel spats, pants, whatever you want to call them. That way when I get a chance I can do some A/B/A testing to see how effective they are, and so I can take them off easily when it's time to play in the dirt again.

The hardest part of the pans build starts this evening, next up is one more somewhat easy pan and then the differential. I feel like this segment will be the difference between better than nothing and hell yes.
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