Ok ok ok, so I know I said that any mods to the Civic may take time, but I geeked out a bit yesterday and mocked up some grille blocking. I'll preface the rest of this post with the fact that I got an extra 2.6mpg out of my morning commute today than I did yesterday's morning commute. An improvement from 41mpg to 43.6mpg AND I got hung up at 4 more red lights than I normally do.
I didn't take any pictures yet because most of the work is just in cardboard mockup. However, for the upper grille I got a bit creative. At first, I was just going to duct tape the upper grille and then paint the duct tape black. Then I had a creative idea! I'm a big fan of spray foam and polyiso insulation and for spray foam, I use one of the "pro-guns" that the larger cans of spray foam screw to. They give you much better control than the standard straw. So I removed my upper grille, duct taped the face of it as flat and even as I could, flipped it over and filled each of the little honeycomb shapes in with spray foam. Once the foam cures, I'll remove the duct tape, shave the foam flat at the face and spray paint it black. That way, the upper grille will still look as stock as possible while also acting as a grille block. I'll take some pics when it's back on and purdy.
For the lower grille, I've mocked up some cardboard and secured it with zip ties. The opening was maybe 6" across. This morning was about 65 degrees and the car hit 204 (my car's fan trigger temp) about halfway through my commute, would drop to about 197 and rise again, but wouldn't go above 207 as long as I was cruising. This is warmer than I care for...considering these Civics are prone to warping heads in high heat. I couldn't hear it, but I assume that those temperature swings were the result of the fans cycling. When I got to work, I opened about 4" more of opening each way (for a total of about 8" more total opening) because it's going to be damn near 90 degrees on the way home. Once I determine an opening that will survive an Alabama summer, I'll build some permanent polyiso insulation blocks, paint them, and secure them in with a "staged" block system that will allow me to add and remove sections of the "safe" opening to keep pace with the weather...most likely with industrial grade Velcro so I'm not screwing with zip ties all the time.
I'm going to run this grille block setup for this tank so I can see how much of an effect it has across an entire tank. After I determine it's effect over this tank, my next mod to "test" is the lawn edging air dam. It'll get run down through a whole tank as well. Thanks for reading!
