Re: Is this a dumb idea?

From: TonyC (acellan1@tampabay.rr.com)
Date: Tue Mar 19 2002 - 01:31:26 EST


If you have access to an airboat....

Airboat in front of your truck (well affixed to a trailer, and behind a nice
heavy truck), heavy duty scales under back wheels, a wind speed indicator
(home depot, walmart - home weather station?). Play with the angle.

A little bit of red-neck wind tunnel racing here. We did this with our race
boat to see where wind drag was.

We have videos stashed somewhere. Anyway in our case, we were able to free
up 2 mph at the top end. Not an easy task in a stock engined class, got us
to the point where we have the title sponsor of the race program. I'm not
going to say their name here because its not in my vocab, and I like beating
up there Camaros at the track ;-)

TonyC

-----Original Message-----
From: Jayson Woodruff <woodrufj@cox.net>
To: dakota-truck-moderator@bent.twistedbits.net
<dakota-truck-moderator@bent.twistedbits.net>
Date: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 12:36 AM
Subject: Re: DML: Is this a dumb idea?

>
>Please don't call me "son", I don't appreciate the condescending nature,
only my
>father can get away with that.. Now my question is about down force, not
autoXing
>seat time. I said 100lbs at 40mph (not 40lbs). The "Wild Ass" part of my
>calculation doesn't take spring rates and moments (from the axle?). I can
sorta
>see where a rotational moment could change the #'s (a little), but I don't
see
>where spring rates would some into it (force has got to be equal on both
sides of
>the spring). It's a calculation of wind speed, air density and tail gate
angle.
>The result is force in the downward direction on the tail gate hinges,
there's
>also obviously force in the reward direction too, but I didn't mention it.
>
>I got the tail gate fabbed up now. I used some turn buckle things sorta
like
>TonyC mentioned. There is eye bolts on each end of the turnbuckle. One
end is
>bolted to the gate latching points of the bed (and spaced out a little) and
the
>other is bolted where the rope ties to the gate. The ones I used might be
a
>little big for the application. I can get an angle of about 60 to 0deg (0
is gate
>completely open). I could get a steeper angle if I used a smaller
turnbuckle.
>I'll post up pictures when I get around to it.
>
>Jay W



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