[The Toecutter]

I have the weatherstripping mounts installed on the lid piece to somewhat seal the airgaps and am about to go for another ride. I plan to cut some rubber into shapes at some point to make waterproof seals.

This is the first velomobile I have ever ridden and I love riding it. I can only imagine what a Milan SL or Quest or other decently-performing well-made commercial velomobile would be like... The speed improvement is very obvious even without a speedometer installed just going by the higher gear I can cruise in with the same cadence on a given amount of effort before the mid-section piece was first tried versus just having the open body, and also from the open body versus the naked trike.

I took a 10 mile ride with the midsection piece on two days ago, but the air gaps were unsealed and it was held in by nothing but pressure and friction. Now it has latches and the gaps are sealed, and I bet it will make a big difference in drag. I'm about to go on a 30 mile ride and get a feel for it.

This design iteration will be replaced by something with significantly less drag in the coming months.

The CarCycle is an interesting design to study. I like its front end. I have something envisioned in my head but undrawn that looks like a sort of mix of elements between a Panhard CD Peugeot 66C streamliner, LeMans velomobile, Lotus 119B gravity racer, and an Infiniti Prototype 9 designed in a way to minimize aero drag for the given chosen shape style and practical constraints. I might be able to do a prototype shape in coroplast. I think such a shape on my KMX done right has potential to get a CdA in the 0.09 m^2 range or less. I would need to model it and test it, but we'd be talking about a frontal area around 0.45 m*2 necessitating rack and pinion steering. This would make it competitive to a Quest, Strada, or Mango velomobile if this were to be achieved, and I know it is possible for an open-wheeled vehicle to get a Cd in the 0.2 range(Rumpler had a 0.28). Done right, I think it would be very aestheticly pleasing and not expensive to produce or replicate.

I would be very pleasantly surprised if I later found my current existing 4-sided cross section shape as it is today to get anything below a 0.2 m^2 CdA, but I really have no idea what it is at all at the moment.