Project: The Anal Probe

[Sven7]

Get this out of my driveway already...

1992 Ford Probe

[freebeard]

[Sven7]

I haven't been driving it for a few weeks at least, but the Probe is officially off insurance now. I'm going to clean out everything I want, fill it with spare parts and park it in the woods until it sells.

[Sven7]

The Anal Probe has been sold to a Probe enthusiast. Recouped my purchase price

[Regenerit]

Nice! How beat up was it after you were all done with it? (in terms of stuff thats important for resale: paint, trim, wheels, tires, engine, interior, etc).

[Sven7]

Hahaha! The paint was trashed... green flaking off everywhere. I scratched the sh*t out of the rear bumper pushing it around with the tractor. Still duct tape on it where the boat tail attached. Screw holes from that and the wheel skirts. Interior trim was literally in a pile. Tires were good and engine was good (aside from having cold-start problems). Still leaks gas. I guess the guy's going to fix stuff then drive it.

Oh, and the rear of the interior (metal parts) are sticker bombed.

The thing's well worth $400 though!

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by Sven7

I am in no way an expert but would like to try to decipher this stuff. Here's what I posit. It's not fact; it's hypothesis.

There are four longitudinal vortexes forming on the car that we can see now. The major ones are coming off the side windows and rotating up and in. As they turn, they sweep outward on the rear window, clearing the snow off. The lines of snow at the edge of the rear window show us the point at which the vortexes contact the air coming off the side window.

The smaller vortexes, which I'm not so sure about, are coming off the small belt line/shoulder of the car. You can see thin streaks of snow above the serial numbers on the rear quarter panels. I believe a similar thing is happening compared to the rear window, but the air is moving from the high pressure side of the car to the lower pressure top, creating a small vortex between those snow streaks and the side windows.

The triangles at the beginning of the boat tail display the turbulence aft of my "stealth" gap filler. There is an especially large turbulent area behind the hand hole on the drivers side that I use to pull the lift gate up.

There seem to be transverse vortexes rotating behind the pop-up headlights and you can see a high pressure zone at the base of the windshield (bottom right image).

The thing I'm confused about is the diagonal snow streak between the edge of the rear window and the middle snow pile. This seems to be in the middle of that major vortex. Strange.

Hopefully those conclusions are close to reality. I've messaged our resident expert aerohead to see if he'll have anything to say... what do you all think?

I believe that the vortices are holding attached flow down the centerline and it does not have enough kinetic energy to swipe the snow away.
What as fabulous project!
Can't thank you enough for all the energy.
Hope the new owner restores her to her full glory.

[Oceanic815]

Interesting read; thanks for the 85 pages worth!

[razordave]

This thread almost made me buy a ford probe. I just can't find one under a grand. I'll never buy another ford for over a grand