[elhigh]

Hey Colton,

Looking at your van, looking in particular at the rear doors, I wonder if you could build a couple of extra clamshells that would close on top of them. The idea is that you could open the extra skins and prop them open like a Trailer Tail, wide enough to get the wake to reattach but still tapering in to reduce the overall wake effect. Another panel at the top would close the top of the wake. The bottom would just have to be the hot mess it is, I guess, unless you're very clever and can come up with a good solution for down there as well. Right now I'm at work and can't devote much thought to it. But looking at actual Trailer Tails that trucking companies are paying good money for, you can see that they don't have to be perfect to be effective and economically worth the trouble. And like a Trailer Tail, when it comes time to park you can just fold them up. So you'd be longer on the road but not in the garage, and it would be a matter of seconds to make the transition.

It wouldn't be the complete, ideal tail that would bring your whole wake to a smooth point, but it would be about 2.5' of taper that could reduce your vacuum wake to a lot less than it currently is. Any improvement on this rolling refrigerator box is, well, an improvement.

But that's a big project. Smaller, quicker and much much easier are rear wheel fender skirts, smoothie wheel discs up front, and a belly pan. To answer your earlier question, plain ol' coroplast gets it done for belly pans, but for a quickie proof of concept project you could put something together with cardboard. Use plenty of supports to keep the cardboard from tearing in the wind, and be advised that one puddle = no more bellypan. And with either coroplast or cardboard, beware the exhaust system. Insulate it, provide ventilation, stay the heck away from it, whatever. But with either material, the high heat could prove very problematic.