Geo Metro rear wheel skirts - 2 examples

[MetroMPG]

not sure if these images will show up in this forum (sometimes you have to be logged in to the hosting forum site to view em. so i'm posting links as well...)

sheet metal wheel skirts with dzus fasteners on a 95+ suzukiclone:

http://www.teamswift.net/album_page.php?pic_id=7942 ...
http://www.teamswift.net/album_page.php?pic_id=7941 ...
http://www.teamswift.net/album_page.php?pic_id=7940 ...
http://www.teamswift.net/album_page.php?pic_id=7939 ...

[MetroMPG]

The guy who made those posted a description of his methods here:

http://www.teamswift.net/viewtopic.php?t=23334

[MetroMPG]

some pics of my car's skirts project... well, one of this weekend's projects!

click to zoom.

[MetroMPG]

My skirts were originally held on with velcro. i decided against drilling thru the sheet metal for fasteners because of rust concerns. i probably could have sealed it properly, but i have a bad habit of doing things the hard way.

[MetroMPG]

Including making the prototype/mockup, i'd say probably 3 or 4 hrs went into making the skirts. And I have another hr -ish to go to finish the driver's side.

Quote:
I noticed in the pics that you still have your mud flaps on. If you took them off wouldn't that help with the drag also?
yup. absolutely right. but...

- the rears serve as a handy attachment point for the skirts, saving having to form a more complex shape at the trailing edge to meet the bumper. so there's that functional reason. plus,

I've since removed the front mudflaps though.

[MetroMPG]

I had the car rust-treated today, so I removed the rear wheel skirts.

This is the first time I've had them off since I made them back in late April. The velcro did a good job holding them on the car, but as predicted, the glue holding the velcro to the car/skirts wasn't as strong as the velcro itself, and some of it pulled off.

So I've got to fix that. Plus I'm going to put some coroplast backing on the skirts to make them a little bit more rigid. Krazy Karpet gets too soft in the summer - and I may have heard them "flapping" once.

[bbb3108]

Plastic and velcro?! Awesome, I think this is the direction I am going to take for my wheel skirts as well. Once I tune up my 91 civic and get some accurate MPG numbers, I might have a few questions for you. That will probably be at least a month away.

[MetroMPG]

Neither the plastic nor the velcro turned out to be awesome in the end.

I had to reinforce the plastic (too thin - in the heat of summer, it was wobbly). And the first time I removed the skirt, I tore most of the velcro off (meaning, the velcro stuck together and I tore it away from the adhesive).

[donee]

Hi Metro,

Various plastics have socalled low suface activity. Or in other words, glues wont stick. One plastic that glue likes is ABS. Another is rigid PCV. PP, PE and other olefins do not stick well. Epoxy in particular will not stick to PE.

[MetroMPG]

Hi donee - I used a kind of thick silicone type stuff. I don't remember exactly what type it was, which isn't very useful. It pulled equally off the painted surface of the wheel arch lip as well as the skirt plastic itself.

Regardless, velcro wasn't practical. Even if the adhesive had stuck, it was too hard to install & uninstall the skirt (the velcro would grab before you had it in position, etc.)