Subaru Outback Kammback Experiment

[brucey]

Commission based Sales. (:

[SwamiSalami]

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooh aaaaaaaaaahhh

[brucey]

Decided to do a quickie on my day off with some of the same coroplast I used originally. Missed the modding days.

Anywho, I think the angle is better on it this time, will let someone smarter than me be the judge. Can you heat up coroplast to make compound bends any easier? I'm ok drilling into the hatch for a permanent connection and making the shape good, but mine always wants to just get a crease. I know there have been bondo/fiberglass ones, but coroplast is cheap and if I could just get that bend on it would look/perform fine with very little time involved.

[SwamiSalami]

awesome! niiiiice

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by brucey

Decided to do a quickie on my day off with some of the same coroplast I used originally. Missed the modding days.

Anywho, I think the angle is better on it this time, will let someone smarter than me be the judge. Can you heat up coroplast to make compound bends any easier? I'm ok drilling into the hatch for a permanent connection and making the shape good, but mine always wants to just get a crease. I know there have been bondo/fiberglass ones, but coroplast is cheap and if I could just get that bend on it would look/perform fine with very little time involved.

I wouldn't try this in the kitchen oven,but if you constructed (threw together) some sort of insulated box,with some heat lamps inside;you could experiment with a scrap of the plastic.
The trick would be having a wooden mold to blow,or vacuum the plastic onto or into to create the shape.

[Sven7]

You could get away with a more aggressive angle. Would this lower drag even more? We don't know. You should try enclosing the sides though. You could bring the sides all the way down to the bumper, creating a clean cutoff point for air. We don't know how much time the designers spent in the wind tunnel working on those corners, either, so testing is important.

Anyway. When making my lawn edging air dam I held the plastic close to the woodburning stove in the barn for a few minutes and it softened enough to bend better. You might try a hair dryer on its hottest setting.

[brucey]

How about a 1800 watt heat gun instead?

Got to try this out just a little so far. I do need to bring the sides down more as at 65 mph it is kind of flapping from the wind, not a lot, only around 2 inches up and down, but enough for me to reinforce it for sure.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by brucey

How about a 1800 watt heat gun instead?

Got to try this out just a little so far. I do need to bring the sides down more as at 65 mph it is kind of flapping from the wind, not a lot, only around 2 inches up and down, but enough for me to reinforce it for sure.

I don't even know if coroplast can be thermo-formed.It was originally extruded through a die set as melted pellets whereas ABS is a sheet compound and designed for thermo-forming,
If you're after compound curves I think you'll need tooling and full heating of the material.
Thermo-formed material has 'memory' and after formed and cooled will return to its pre-formed shape if re-heated.
You'll have only one chance to get it right.
Papier mache is a very low-tech way to achieve extremely complex compound forms and can be 'glassed' to protect it from the elements.

[SwamiSalami]

I'm going to try and do this tomorrow or Tuesday ish. I've got some materials left over from my grill block.