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Another civic hatchback boattail...
So I'm going to jump on the still relatively small bandwagon of civic hatchbacks with boattails. A few of my goals will be to build the boattail completely off of the hatch to a) retain the hatchyness of the hatch—the function of which I find very useful, and b) to keep the project as reversible as possible. I've located and purchased a new (used) hatch, front bumper, and side skirts from a blown EK that was sitting in someone's lawn near the Canadian boarder in VT. All told, $85 so far. I've also gone in for a ScanGaugeII, which isn't here yet. The bumper and side skirts will also be installed in an aerodynamically advantageous way by blocking up the bumper air inlets and perhaps selling the side skirts for belly pan material. I hear they're desirable on older civics because they make the cars look lower.
My questions revolve around what material I'll be using to 'skin' the boattail. An obvious choice would be sheet metal rivited to a metal frame, a la AndrewJ. Since I'm not riveting it to the body of the car, I'd like the skin to be a bit more contourable near its edges. I've been pondering rigid foam w/ resin/'glass skin. Very light, very contourable, very strong (surf boards, airplane wings, ect). The problem is that I'd need to find some really thick stuff to get it curved the right way, and I'm trying to keep the project as affordable as possible. Another thought is to have a pretty detailed frame and stretch a skin over it. The skin could then be hardened any number of ways. This is common and proven in small aircraft design and would be pretty light weight. Yet another thought is to use ABS plastic. I wonder, though, if it would be maliable enough to bend around the frame elegantly. I don't have access to an 8 foot deep toaster oven to heat the piece all at once, but I do have a heat gun that would be able to do it a little at a time.
Please weigh in on this.
Other concerns are the fitup between the edges of the boat tail and the sides/bottom of the car. It won't be attached at those points since it will be built off of the hatch. The fit needs to either be really really precise or I need to figure out some 'solution' to the problem that avoids having to get the tail tolerances to incredible A+ achievement. This is my first time working on anything like this, so I am expecting some mistakes and backtracking.
Luckily, I'll have master ecomodder Ben Jones on my side to keep me from totally screwing things up.
I'd be glad to hear people's opinions and ideas. So far, my only mod is inflating 3 of 4 tires to 45 psi. The fourth one rejects my bike pump and I'm too cheap to pay the 75 cents to use a gas station one. I'll figure out a way soon. I'll also be needing to take my bike racks off the roof sooner or later...
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