Help with my aero mods: 1.8L 05 Auto Toyota Corolla

[BBsGarage]

Plain ole steelies cost about $35-$40 each at a place like the Tire Rack.
Try your local salvage/junk yard. or maybe CL.

[blackjackel]

I did my lower grill block mod, i used vertical strips of white duct tape and taped it all the way down, then I used horizontal strips all the way across the bumper to make it look aesthetically pleasing.

Thanks to cfg83 I also got the "racing disk" aka "moon" hubcaps, that should improve aero slightly.

Here is the original:


Here is my mockup:


Here is my final result:


Again original:


And final:


Last time original:


Aaaand final result:

[holypaulie]

Very smooth good job!

[trikkonceptz]

Let us know how those partial wheel skirts work out too ...

[blackjackel]

Ok, so I'm on vacation and cant sleep.... guess I'll post about future mods...

Soon as I get back from vacation, I'm going to start modding up my corolla again and I'm in need with some opinion on wheel skirt mods, unfortunately, my car body curves under the tire:



Less so from the front:


how do i take this into consideration when skirting my wheel? do I make the skirt flush with the car body?

[blackjackel]

Alright, I've decided to go ahead and fabricate myself some wheel skirts, I've decided I don't want to do any drilling ANYWHERE, meaning the skirt cage will be clamped to my wheel well.

I need a bendable material that will allow me to bend it so I can clamp it to the inside of the wheel whell and I need to find some sort of really strong clamps to hold the cage on there...

[MetroMPG]

blackjackel: go here - http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...metro-103.html

There's a pic of my "no drilling" attachment method, using flattened copper pipe to make the brackets which I clamped on to the wheel arch lip.

[blackjackel]

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

blackjackel: go here - http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...metro-103.html

There's a pic of my "no drilling" attachment method, using flattened copper pipe to make the brackets which I clamped on to the wheel arch lip.

actually your post is one of the refrences i'm using to try and do this, I gave cfg83 and me and him are going to meet tomorrow and try to make ourselves some skirts... the thing I'm interested in the most is the material used to make the cage to fit the skirt on...

[cfg83]

blackjackel -

Originally Posted by blackjackel

Alright, I've decided to go ahead and fabricate myself some wheel skirts, I've decided I don't want to do any drilling ANYWHERE, meaning the skirt cage will be clamped to my wheel well.

I need a bendable material that will allow me to bend it so I can clamp it to the inside of the wheel whell and I need to find some sort of really strong clamps to hold the cage on there...

This is the "mini clamp" option I was talking about :



It's a sliding window security lock. It can lock onto material that has a width up to 1/4". If the "key screw" causes interference with the tire, you can replace it with a grub screw. If you use the grub screw, the maximum clearance requirement is about 5/16". However, you need enough clearance for an L-shaped hex-wrench to screw in the grub screw.

If there is still an interference problem, there are other manufacturers of these window security locks that may have smaller dimensions.

CarloSW2

[blackjackel]

Alright, well I've met with cfg83 and we spent a whole day working on the skeleton for the wheel covers... Since I had replaced my jack and spare tire with fix-a-flat we couldn't jack my car up (we tried his jack but the bolts on my tire were slightly larger and so we couldn't get the wheel off), drilling was impossible with the wheel on.

We tried the window security lock idea listed above this post, but it wasn't secure enough... it was going loose with a little abuse... we also tried buying mini clamps from home depot and those didn't work either... there was either not enough room in the wheel well to clamp them or there wasn't enough room between them and the tire to install.... so we scratched that idea too...

What we ended up doing was hot gluing neodymium magnets to both the car and the frame and having the magnets attach to each other, making this skirt cage easily detachable, simple wrench off and snap back on... the attraction between two neodymium magnets was so powerful that it took us great effort to separate them from each other... there is no way I can hit a bump hard enough to get the magnets to fly off of each other.

Here are the pictures:

Wheel with cage on


Same wheel with cage, view from the back


Same wheel with cage, view from the front


Same wheel, view from the top:


Same wheel, closeup of how close the plastic bit gets to the wheel



Same wheel, closeup of how the joint in the cage is hotglued and ziptied together


Closeup of magnet glued to car


Closeup of magnet glued to top of wheel


closeup of magnet glued to cage


cage shown taken off of wheel


Other wheel (left wheel) view


Other wheel back view


Other wheel view from front


Other wheel angle view


Other wheel top down view


Other wheel angle 2


Other wheel angle 3


Back of car view


Much thanks to cfg83 for the help, tools, opinions, and manpower for doing this, we will be modding his car next.

Please please give us some feedback on this, how does it look? Did I go too low on the tire (since the car curves inwards from the top), thoughts? Opinions? Rants?