The gap-filler window is on the road, although I might need to remove it for the road-trip at the end of this month, not sure yet. However, here's the car in full boat-tail-configuration:
I forgot to mention; I also painted the hitch box lid black, since that is the component that sits in the reflection in the boat-tail windows. The darker and more matte the lid, the less interference you see in the windows.
An idea how it's built and attached:
The screws go through the hinges into jack-nuts installed in the acrylic. (I have to look up on Mcmaster to see if I'm remembering the right name: also called screwdriver-installed-rivet-nuts.)
The cut you see was needed to 'shrink' just a bit, as an adjustment to get the piece to mate with the Kammback.
I decided the gap-filler-window needed to be totally transparent. So then how do you heat the acrylic (PMMA) to bend it? Last time I tried a heat gun, and it took forever. This time I used a little propane plumbing torch. Easy!
An idea what the view looks like, from the point of view of the driver (turned to the left, like if you were backing up):
There is potential trouble with cold precipitation, which I'm expecting on this road-trip, so unless I'm really on it and get a 12V defroster contraption wired up, the gap filler will probably sit this one out. Also, being acrylic, it can't be scraped for ice (I checked with a piece of scrap - it got scratched up).
Apparently I didn't shoot these so you can tell, but I'm pulled just off the frontage road not far from the Salt Lake, there's a rather flat segment of a couple miles with newish pavement - a rather good place to coast-down when the wind is down (which happens here and there).
Unfortunately the GPS did something bizarre and the data is more-or-less garbage:
You might think this is something I could process my way out of, add some smoothing, or cut the weird points, or better yet if I could find evidence of the phone's clock skipping around. I looked at the raw data closely and couldn't see any neutral way to reprocess. I think this is the first time I've captured GPS with the music player running, maybe that's at fault. There may be ways to get better GPS data with a different app (this was MyTracks). I've also got a low-end bluetooth OBDII dongle and the Android Torque app, so I've tinkered a bit with the OBD speed sensor, which outputs an integer km/h. Unfortunately I haven't got the too-cheap knock-off ELM device to delivering reliable short polling intervals - in other words, rounding would be fine if the polling interval could be minimized so I could get an accurate time stamps on the km/h splits, but otherwise it's a mess.
Thinking it's about time to go to the robust DIY solution: a bicycle computer.
But I'm probably just going to focus on the wheel skirts, grille block, maybe air dam for now. Back to testing and fine tuning my boat-tail later.
Today
Other popular topics in this forum...
I wasn't looking at it right. Normally you have four linkage bars that constrain the moving item (your classic street rod front end). In this case the two bars swap function with the other items.
