But I love these mud flaps!!
 

Rear:
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...r/CRV/M036.jpg
Front:
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...r/CRV/M038.jpg

I ordered these and installed them in January of 2000. They have really kept the gunk off the sides of my car..
But with today's gas prices..?..
As you can see, they have a cup-rim around their edges! What could be worse?

My estimate: Each one is costing about 1/4 MPG.. So, I should see a 1 MPH improvement when these are in the re-cycle bin.?.

Or, am I wrong and the flaps should actually help the cd..?.

Comments please:

fill the cup with spray foam insulation.. then make a boat tail behind them.. it will make a mudflap that helps MPG

To illustrate ebacherville post:

Is the drive mostly city or highway? If mostly city I doubt it will make that big a difference. Don't know where you are located but if it's up north you could always just use them in the winter when the weather is not so good.

hehe, up north the snow and ice pile up and make ice boattails behind the tires .. mother nature fixing your areo.. to bad they weigh about 20 pounds each and fall off all the time

yeah i hate when my natural aero fixes fail
http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1129

How would you like to get off the plane wonder to the parking lot to find this.

http://i160.photobucket.com/albums/t...oto/carice.jpg

Plus, he has those crappy roof racks.. At least mine have some semblance of streamlining. :cool:

I see what you mean.. And it would be easy to fill the cup and top it off with coroplas.. But the boat-tail behind it would be too much work..

Maybe it's best I say goodbye to them..

they don't seem to be to aggressive... so thay're likely to be well within the tire wake.
maybe you could swap the front ones lef-rigth so they mount backwards...that seems smoother... or add some small kamback farings around it (as would be the case if they where backwards), so you get a virtual boattail...

mudflaps have a good side in keeping the car clean and undamaged from rocks so if you want that aspect you might just try to optimise them....if not, loose them

also when you don't strictly need them you could take them of and do some A-B testing

I finally gave up on vanity and removed my front mud flaps. The rear ones stayed on because I used them to mount the wheel skirts.

I may put the front ones on the EV, because it sees much lower speeds, and more crappy weather winter driving.

If you got off the plane to find that, you should slit your wrists, because few cars are worse than the Trabant. Not only is it a symbol of horrific Cold-War era oppression, but the body is an unrecyclable plastic, pushed around by a two stroke engine with no emission control.

Maybe I'll clean these up and save them.. In case I decide to sell it someday.

I can see how the rear one might be used to hold a cross support for a skirt,
but the flaps are so soft, I think it might wobble in the breeze.


Yeah I think the least amount of work will be to take them off.
Maybe I'll wait until I get some Moon disc or KleenWheels to install.
Kill two drags with one stone..

Thanks,
Rich

Making Wheel Dams from old mud flaps??
 

Thanks for the L-R swap idea, if I mounted them on the front of the wheel well, I would have wheel dams!

I was looking over the rear flaps today and the front area of the wheel well just might be an good fit for the swapped flaps.

The front flaps don't look as good for this trick. But, if they don't fit well enough, I might be able to use the rears up front.


If they did actually fit (swapped around), I'm wondering if they would need
to be cut shorter a little.?. The wheel dams I've seen on modern cars seem to
be only an inch or two in height.

http://www.cleanmpg.com/photos/data/...re_Air_Dam.jpg
This one looks like it might be 2"-2.5" tall..

Cheers,
Rich

i've been playing around with wheel dams and looking into them, from what i've learend from oem setups and what the picture above also illustrates is that they seem to be largely placed to deflect air aways from the suspention and wheelwell gap (wich is bigger at the front because of steering) rather then the tire itself... maybe the tire could use some sheiedling as wellnbut be carefull not to defelect air to the wheelwell where apparently it's not wanted either.

i've had the same thought about useing mudflaps as airdams, but in the end they wouldn't fit that way, and would have been way to big...

i think these things dams need to be exacly sized to work, so imho putting them in front of the wheels as they are might not work.

what i meant is place them in the original location but backwards.

i don't remember where, but i've seen figures that sugest mudflaps could cause up to 7% of the total drag. might be worth takeing them off.

also just a thought but perhaps you could stick some (clear) vinyl? film on the car in locations where you'd suspect stone dameage, that might protect the surface...or black film might make the car look more ruged then mudflaps and you could use splatter patters as a guide to where they'd need to be.

Stock rear wheel dams on my corolla don't seem to be doing much...
http://spidermouse.us/modding/car/bad_airdam.jpg

Wow.. What good is that going to do hanging out there like that?

Edit: Are you sure that isn't just a bracket for mounting a mudflap??


I also have heard of the 7% figure. I wonder if that's the average or worse case scenario?

If I can get some front air dams out of the deal or not, those mudflats are going into storage.. (Soon as the weather cools off a little).

Back in 2000 when I put these on, I remember wondering how much drag I was adding to the car.

well i just looked back at my gasslog for my previous car... when i got it it had mudflaps that where just huge, after i took them off i saw about a 2-3 mpg improvement. but again they projected quite a bit beyond the sides of the wheels.

as for that corolla dam, it does look suspicious,but i don't think they'd have bothered to put it there if it did notting, it's not like anyone care or even knows these things are there or not so if they didn't work they leave them off and save on production costs... an uncle recently bought a new vw passat, and the dams on the font wheels also had an opening above them, with a duct to them from the front of the fairings... this was a very solid and deliberate setup.... perhaps break cooling...

At first I thought that a bit harsh, but then I realized that the people who had no other choice in what car to drive were not flying on airplanes either. There was a waiting list of years for Trabants in the soviet bloc. Eastern europeans who managed to get over the border (into free europe) in them parked them and walked away.

Exactly. They were successful, because that's all there was. There's lots of good reasons they were abandoned, and seem to all have been turned into art cars since.

Soviet-era cars were mostly all Trabant-like (e.g., Lada, ZAZ, etc.), save for those reserved for the Party (GAZ, Tatra, etc.).

More information:
http://www.autosoviet.altervista.org/main-english.htm

RE: Corolla dam - yeah, that's in front of the rear wheels; not too bright to hang a mud flap there. It does do something: it does give me a mount point for future wheel-tails/dams :)

I saw a Prius on the highway the other day with mud flaps and an empty roof rack speeding along with the windows down. Talk about not getting it...

That Prius was likely doing over 35 MPG (which is my goal).. :)

When I looked at your Toyota pic, I was thinking that was the left rear wheel.!.

Yeah, that does look like the perfect mount for a nice little air dam..
I'll have to check my wife's Toyota and see if there's any mounts under there.

Well, It's not too hot this morning, maybe I'll see if I can get those mud flaps off the car, without removing the wheels..
Which would be a little too much work for an old geezer in this heat!

1/2 hour and they were off!
 

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...RV/flapDel.jpg
They are laying on the garage floor, next to a pile of rear wheel drive parts. :)

It's 91 out (real-feel 111) so I took a little test run up I-95 for about 25 miles.
The coolant stayed at 185 for the trip and peaked at 202 while stopped.

I was displaying(X-gauge) my AFE (trip-current-MPG) on the way over to I-95.
The hills, lights and stop-n-go back streets weren't kind.
It started out at <8 MPG, but by the time I got to I-95 it was showing 20 MPG!

(My X-gauge letters 'AFE' stands for Average FE).

Once on I-95, I hit the reset. I must have been going down hill a little,
since the AFE started off in the 40s! So, I waited for a flat spot.
When the real time MPG was about 30, I hit the trip MPG reset again.
Got a good reset that time. The AFE started off at 30 MPG and dropped at the first hill.
But, at the next hill, the drop wasn't quite as much. So, I kept driving.
Slowly, the AFE got up to 33! It would move up and down a little
as I went up and down hills, but it was slooooowly moving up.
At the exit & turn-around, it took a little hit. But once I was on the way back,
it was at 33 pretty fast and slowly getting better! By the time I got back and
took my exit, it was up to 34.6 MPG!

Due to the traffic on I-95 today, I had to drive faster than I wanted to a few times.
But I think my average speed was about the same as the last run up I-95. (52 MPH & 33 MPG).

After deleting the mud flaps, I had expected to see between 0.5 & 1.0 MPG
improvement. So, the first test run seems to confirm there was some
improvement. It's likely that I'll never know exactly how much.

Humm, I wonder what the wind load is on that Ham antenna?

Anyways, my goal of 35 MPG highway seems to be within easy reach.
However, I still have to get another fill up and input my Tank off-set.
So right now, the only thing I really know with a little measure of certainty is,
there seems to have been some improvement..

Some > None :-D Huzzah!

Rear mud flap mod and re-install
 

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...r/CRV/M036.jpg
These mud flaps had to go.. The bottom lookeds like parachutes.

http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1.../gapomatic.jpg
However, when they were gone that seemed to open the wheel well into a large open area inside the rear bumper. Which might cause more drag and might fill up with snow in the winter..

So, I cut the bottom (flap section) off and re-installed the two rear semi-flaps.
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...RV/chopped.jpg

Looks pretty sweet now.. :)

Here's a shot from the rear, showing the large cavity that's no longer so badly exposed to the left rear tire.
http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f1...oppedRview.jpg

I'm pretty sure this change will have only a slight effect on the CD, but it is very likely to be helpful when driving in snow.

Wouldn't hurt to cover over that parachute behind the rear wheel either, I have one on my civic as well, seems like it's there for a muffler maybe? Either way it's not helping anything.

The muffler eats up a lot of the space on the right side, but the left side is wide open.
Just read a little about rear Diffusers and I think you might be right about the big void being a real drag. :eek:

I'll make some measurements and check for some good mounting spots.
Maybe I will try to patch up this problem, since it doesn't seem like too much of a job.