Teardrop camper

[Ecky]

I'll be frank - bending the wood looks like too much a project for me right now. Assuming I don't, what are my best options, in terms of shape, keeping in mind the compromises of headroom and usable floor space?

I'm happy to tear it down and rebuild later.

[skyking]

OK frank, I'll be skyking. Just don't call me shirley :P
go ahead and skin what you got going to get going if you wish, ecky. I was just tossing out ideas. Are you going over that with thin plywood for a roof?
Come back to the curvy stuff later, like in the winter.

[Ecky]

I have piles and piles of tongue and groove, so I was going to use that for the roof, and seal it however I needed to. It would be equally little work to do a shepherd's trailer style roof though.

I suppose I could cut the sides down a little and try a curved roof with a straight 7° taper from front to back.

[skyking]

I personally like that idea. Leave it out there and see what the others think.
You could do a couple of pitches too. Think 3 angle rounded roof with the 7 degree one in the middle, a -2 up front and a 12 at the back. It wood perform

[Fat Charlie]

Roger, Roger.

My understanding of what a camper is a bit different. It's not there to be Dark Aero, it's there to provide living space. You want it to provide as much of that as you need while hurting driving efficiency as little as possible by minimizing size, weight and drag. The number (and type) of people you're bringing dictates the size you need, which goes a long way to dictating weight. With any size bigger than a coffin, aero drag is going to be huge and the best thing is to admit it and just try to not make it worse than it has to be.

You can compromise on living space for the sake of aerodynamics, but it really only carries so far. Something from Little Guy like their MyPod B@sic is a pretty extreme version of this and while there's plenty of room for aero improvement, it's a camper. Boattailing it would add usable space, it would get used and then it would weigh more. For more than one (or two very friendly people) or anyone who has to spend any time inside, one of Safari Condo's smaller offerings is still pretty extreme.

My answer was a pop-up. We sleep four. We can have stuff inside and are capable of cooking real meals and even eating them inside. It collapses for travel, tucking mostly behind our minivan, and being collapsible means most of the walls are lightweight fabric. We didn't get it because we wanted to spend time inside it, but we wanted to be able to. When we have to set up and get the kids fed when it's dark and raining, this manages:



When you consider that, the fact that it mostly tucks behind our minivan is amazing!



Maybe something like a boattail/kammback out of coroplast and duct tape would help, but I've never felt the need to add gear and steps to the setup and takedown. Of course, a coroplast tail could ride on top of the slide out bed extension while it's set up...

[freebeard]

If I'm to understand correctly, what I really need is a compound curve so as to not create vortices at the corners and sharp edges.

The shape you circled would have good airflow in a headwind, but fall apart in crosswind conditions. The edges are problematic in the direction of flow but a <10° break at right angles to the flow won't be. From the thread I pointed to:



Simple curves with sheet materials. The break-over angle varies between ~120° and 0 from bottom to top. An experiment with joining sheet materials:



A flexible H-shaped strip captures the edges in the join that runs across the curve. In both cases only the edge is rolled on an arbitrarily large piece. But, you say, I only have wood and it's too thick to steam and bend.



Geodesic construction approximates a sphere with flat pieces. The pieces, be they triangles, diamonds or hexagons, have a taper like a cork in a bottle. Lots of angle cuts and edge joins with this one.

Do you think a level, rounded roof at 44" high, with no front to back taper, would have less drag than a flat roof with hard edges, a peak at 44", tapering to 32" at the back?

I interpret this as a curve running lengthwise (shepherd) vs crosswise (teardrop). Maybe aerohead knows. It will depend on the wind shadow of the tow vehicle, edge radii, etc.

Another question you might ask is rear entrance vs side entrance. In you case, would you rather crawl onto the foot of the mattress or the side.

A side entrance:



That's a double side door with only the front one open. Not like crawling into a dark hole at all. A rear entrance:


http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/threads/143100-SOLD-2007-Airstream-Basecamp

Have you searched for other threads? Because there're lots of them

http://ecomodder.com/forum/attachmen...p;d=1330024093
http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/trailer-shape-better-20662.html <--eleven pages.

Wood strips and tongue-and-groove would need to be tapered for a compound curve. Not an impossible task.

Plywood bulkheads, wood strips and shingles laid like fish scales.

[BamZipPow]

You can build it boxy now and add on foam sheets later to sculpt in yer radius edges.

Hey...I got a mention!

[skyking]

Charlie, we have many fond memories of our tent camping days. The honda pilot barely knew it was back there.

[elhigh]

Looking at the Trailer Tail, I wonder if you could add a foldaway/inflatable tail to your teardrop.

I'm always dismayed at the little fenders over the trailer wheels on these things. I think of two possible approaches:

1) Taper the fender both in profile and in plan. That is, it doesn't have square leading or trailing edges at all.

2) Capture the tire under the wall of the teardrop. This means the teardrop will have more width overall (especially inside, where some of them are pretty cramped), but it's not like it's all that big to start with, and with careful design it may have no net effect, especially since we're now talking about one with a proper tail slope, instead of the usual too-fast ones we see.

[freebeard]

2): One could combine the paper model and Popular Mechanix plan I posted previously. The model was divided 3'-4'-5' for an overall length of 12', based on a 4x12 plywood sheet. The taper in the rear section is faster on the sides to compensate for none at the top. If I was doing it today it would be 4'-4'-4' with wheelwells in the middle third and straight cut to simplify construction. The middle third would be a cylinder. And the rear doorway would be a Gothic arch.

As for finishing off what you have started: