Sunday, April 19, 2009

Revised brake duct and inner wheel fairing

Hadn't really been a fan of that previous brake duct inlet. Looked like a leaf blower. Revised that, and added the start of a simple inner wheel fairing. Easy drag reduction, why not.

At the moment the materials are defined as CRFP just for looks, but there are some rules I'll have to revisit on what can be carbon fiber as opposed to glass. S-glass still gives a fairly rigid structure between typical E-glass and carbon. It looks complex but if I use one-off molds with dissolvable foam, it shouldn't be too bad.

Alternatively what might be the best bet would be to direct rapid prototype those complex curvature duct pieces. SLA gets a bit expensive, but 3d-printing out of black ABS is relatively cheap. The machine we had at school was something like $5 per cubic inch of material, and there's not an awful lot of material there.

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