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Old 05-01-2015, 05:05 PM   #7 (permalink)
freebeard
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I'll have eight feet in the middle that will have a flat roof and could have from near-zero to about 6" radius from the roof to the sides, with benefits to the cabinet space on the interior accruing with smaller radii.
Overhead storage changes the picture. How many feet overall? How many axles? How long is the Dakota's bed?

With a vehicle body as tall or taller than it is wide, plan taper is more important because there's twice as much of it. Even if the overhead cabinet doors are flat, the inner [outside] wall can be curved.



The Tropfenwagen shape would be simple to construct. But the roof should be treated like an airplane wingtip. In fact the T-wagen looks like it would be better upside down.

A compound curve shape doesn't have to be hard, use bulkheads and stringers.



Cut your bulkheads like this:



That's a squircle. Here's the shape positioned halfway between a circular and square cross-section (but it can more square-ish or more circular, all laid out with a calculator and a ruler):



Then the stringers can be skipped and covered with fiberglass or butted like a redwood strip canoe (and covered with fiberglass). I have a friend who lived deep in the woods of coastal Oregon who went with plywood ribs, 1x2 stringers, and tensioning wires, then covered the outside with laborously hand carved wooden shingles and had the whole interior sprayed out with poly-eurathane foam. I'd have carved it smooth and painted it with that paint that forms a crust when exposed to fire, but he lived in it for years that way. It was basically a camper sliced out of an egg shape; and appeared in one issue of Shelter but I don't have the page number.

Here's an aerobody added over an egg shape:



If you increase the edge radius, you can bring the cabinet doors together to gain storage space.
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