The Premier's Limo: 2004 Toyota Prius "winter beater" ecomodding thread

[pletby]

That looks really good! I have a nice big piece of coroplast waiting for me to do something with it. Once it warms up again I might finally make wheel skirts.

It's too cold right now though. I had to chase down a heater hose leak at -27C today and that was not fun. I need a garage.

[MetroMPG]

Holy cow... yup that's chilly!

Its still bizarrely warm here. Normally it'd be too cold for me to be doing this stuff outside, but we keep breaking records this winter. It got up to +6 today. Balmy!

I'll get the other side done tomorrow.

[Daox]

The skirts looks great. How solid is the attachment method?

[MetroMPG]

It's solid enough.

I made the skirt for the other side today, and found some plastic (moulding) to use to for the mounting brackets instead of wood scraps.

I dremeled the plastic pieces to mate nicely with the shape of a bead of hard sealant or caulking that's on the underside of the 90 degree lip, so this side grips even better.

Pictures explain it best:



Above: this shows the shape of the bead in the other wheel well where I used wood.





Oh -- and this wheel skirt mod added another mod in its doing: I also deleted the rear mud flaps. (The front ones came off a while back.)

Next up... I think I'll work on modifying my DIY receiver to mount the Civic tail.

[pletby]

Sweet! I look forward to your install of that tail.

[planetaire]

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

...This one doesn't come out from the tire quite as much as I'd like. There's probably only about 1 cm / 3/8" clearance...

Oh, only 1cm !

I put 1.5cm
Less and when you take a turn the tire may touch the skirt.

Do you have a good idea for the front wheels ?

[MetroMPG]

I took the car for a good drive and didn't hear any contact on the skirt. I also used the jack to compress the suspension up into the wheel well, and still no contact. My main concern about the gap is actually for ice and snow build-up. I'll report back after I drive on snowy roads.

As for the front fenders, the easiest thing would be gap fillers along the front & top, and a large radius transition on the rear portion of the arch.

[vskid3]

Nice mods! My Prius is looking pretty lame with just a lower grille block and pumped up tires.

The fuel tank bladder is the devil. Makes it impossible to get consistent fills and kills the range, especially in the cold. It's an 11.9 gallon tank and the most I've put in it was 9.2 gallons on a warm day with the low fuel light on. Even doing 80MPH into a headwind (blasphamy!), I should be able to easily go more than 400 miles on a tank, but I usually fill at about 250 miles in the winter.

[Zach]

I have been lurking and reading a lot of build threads and your work consistently looks professional. I would love to do wheel covers and skirts like you have where you can barely tell they are there. I also own a black car. Is that just black coroplast? How do you make it look so smooth? Sorry for newb questions.

[MetroMPG]

Hey Zach -

Yeah, it's just coroplast. It probably doesn't look as good in person as it does on a screen.

I have a friend who used to have a 100 foot wooden schooner that he of course kept painted with a paint roller, and touch-up jobs were done with A wide brus. We used to joke that it was a fantastic "50-foot paint job."

Same idea

Darin