Quote:
Originally Posted by aerohead
My notes from Mythbusters haven't survived,but I seem to remember that during the F-150 Tailgate testing that the pickups returned on the order of 16 mpg at around 55 mph?
For your rig to be generating these kinds of mpg numbers at 65 mph is really inspiring.
And Edison was probably quite literal when he talked about 99% perspiration!
|
Hi Phil, glad to hear your boat tailer/trailer quest continues. I feel bad I haven't had time to do any more mileage tests on the Aero RV, everytime I've had time to do that we kinda had to go blow off some steam and relax
camping and quadding. All relatively short runs with lots of off road involved.
We just took a bunch of grand kids to the lake to teach them how to ski, and pulled the old Webbcraft, which was a serious test of the extended boat tail and hitch. Holding 3500 pounds of boat, trailer and gear at arms length (3 foot extension over stock) is a pretty serious load.
I was so totalled after four days at the lake dealing with equipment and kids I didn't fill the RV up after we got back into town, but I will as soon as I can. I can tell by the gauge it didn't do great mileage-wise, but the load was so severe I didn't expect it to. I'm just glad the hitch survived the trip.
I kept the 9-inch monitor in quad mode most of the time, see photos, so I was able to keep an eye on the hitch gyrations which were pretty minimal considering the load and varying road surfaces.
Something interesting happened on the way back. Once I got the beast back on the trailer and secured we took off down the road and I realized my seat belt was stuck in the door. I was doing maybe 50 and opened the door to get the belt out and the wind sucked the door open about six inches. It took three serious heave-ho's to get the damn thing to close.
Why is that interesting? If you drew a line from the front of the front fender to the widest part of the RV body right behind the door, the door was sucked right to the edge of that line and did
not want to let me pull it back. In other words it was stuck in the vacuum or eddy created by the wind having to go from the width of the front cab to the width of the camper body. A pretty cool demonstration of aerodynamics at work, and a perfect demonstration of why I can't wait to modify both sides of the body to reduce that effect. That combined with the wheel fairings will put this beast over the top I think.
orbywan