Monday, May 20, 2013

Aero-Shell / FiberGlass fairing



Abraham and Jarrod designed a fiber glass shell for the trailer. Apart from some aerodynamics, this shell would also serve the purpose to carry our sponsor's logos.

They started out by doing some fluid dynamic simulations:



After they got the general shape, they glued a bunch of foam together and they routed some of it on a router and then sanded the rest by hand. Here is the finished mold:

you can see the different layers of foam that got glued together 

We coated the foam with a compound to make it not porous
We received a lot of help from Thomas from SEVT and he was there when we finally did the layup at their space.


After the layup we realized that the mold release we used was not very effective and sadly had to destroy our mold to get the shell out :(.

We then tested the shell on our trailer...

Jarrod fitting the shell to the trailer

Then we spray painted the shell to give it an elephant/duct tape look...

spray painting the fairing...

In the future we will add another layer of paint (probably black) and all our sponsor's logos in white decals.