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Anyone here interested in a super robust splitter mounting system?
Folks,
I ripped my splitter off at 140 at NJMP a couple weeks ago. Lucky for me AJ Hartman makes a very robust splitter, so even though I ran right over it it was for the most part totally in tact. I thought the corner worker was gonna bring it back in a little box. Only damage is on the top side where I obviously ran over it, but the underside which is the business side for airflow is unscathed. Picture below.
The circled red spots are the three clevii I made to mount the thing. The one in the front is missing because it ripped out. A couple things contributed to the failure.
1) The splitter clevii I made were simply too thin. These are clevii I used when I first had a plywood splitter, and they had only 2, 1/8" cross sections to mount to the struts. This may have been fine for the plywood but the tunneled carbon splitter makes a serious amount of downforce, and over time one of the thinner cross sections broke. When one went, I believe the others went, the front wheels ran over the back of the splitter and that ripped it out of the frame and that was all she wrote. However I guess I'm glad that the failure occurred where it did because those thin clevii acted as "the fuse" so I didn't have aluminum struts still attached to the splitter when I ran over it. 3, 12" long aluminum rods flailing around might have done a lot more damage to my car had they still been attached.
Not shown are two hooks that I made that connect underneath the back side of the splitter and attach to my custom radiator cradle. That acts as a stop to keep the splitter from moving backwards and also makes install super easy. I can put this thing on in under 60 seconds by just installing 3 pins.
2) Also contributing to the failure was the slow deformation of the frame where I also installed clevii mounts . These had 1/4" thick cross sections which is more than strong enough to hold the force of the splitter, but I installed them into the M8 Nutserts that are in the frame from the factory. I honestly don't remember what they do when the car is still in street form but since I've removed everything from the front of my car, I saw them and thought "what a lovely place to install splitter supports!" Wrong. Even though the base of the clevii is 1" by 1.25", that wasn't enough surface area to distribute the load against the frame. Overtime the nutserts started to pull down, getting the splitter lower and loosening the connection at the frame. The ultimate failure occurred (I believe) when the splitter was at an improper angle under braking. I think it was scooping air, which made the loose splitter vibrate like crazy, which further broke the lower clevii, and the rest was history. So the fatigue of the actual frame supports also contributed to the demise of my splitter.
I'm headed to Mid Ohio Thursday to race with NASA so I had to to come up with a solution quickly. So the picture below shows the solution:
Behold! I give you the AMT Motorsport Splitter Support System! Triple S! I don't know what to call it. Anyway what you see here are 2 robust clevii which can be rotated to your desired angle, bolted to a .700"thick aluminum plate. The pockets you see are for weight reduction, and the three counter bored holes are for 3/8-16 bolts. I'm going to install three Nutserts into the frame rails at those locations, bolt the thing to it, and with that there will be no way the frame will be tweaked with all the surface area bolted to it. The backside of these plates are counterbored so the head of the nutsert has clearance, so the whole plate is making contact to the frame. So in this case I'll have 4 supports going down to the splitter (though getting rid of the one in the very front), and still have the 2 hooks holding it up in the back. The splitter will still install with 4 pins through the struts so it should only be slightly more tricky to install at the track but not by much.
Anyway I initially had no intentions of selling this as an actual product since it's still not a plug and play solution. You'll still need to come up with mounting positions for your own splitter and you gotta be cool with drilling holes in your frame and installing nutserts. However if you can do that, then this should be a pretty easy, really strong, off the shelf solution to mount a very heavy duty splitter. This ain't gonna be for waxers with ABS splitters (I did that myself back in the day) but for full race car builds. I could also scale this design to use single or triple clevii. I intend to offer mating clevii for the splitter and struts and heim joints as well. All of this of course would be top of the line AMT stuff with the best materials all made in the US of A.
So my actual question - anyone interested in something like this? I would hope to be able to sell what you see here anodized and laser engraved for around $200 for the pair. I've already had a bunch of dudes on Facebook and Instagram tell me they would want a set. If some folks here express interest I'll ram rod the concept into production. After I install it and race with it myself of course to confirm it is fact the bee's knees. Please ask any and all questions you might have! I haven't thought of everything and I won't be installing them til tomorrow, so feedback, questions,and constructive criticism are most appreciated.
2020 Corvette of the Year Finalist (track prepared)
C7 of Year Winner (track prepared) 2019
Currently working on splitter revision 3. I’m interested but I’m also an idiot and need to see these installed to mAke sure what I’m imagining is accurate
Hey folks we're just finalizing some design elements but this is going to go forward. We're gonna make some more aerodynamic clevii for splitter and frame, Titanium and aluminum wear plates for the base of the splitter, and swedged rods and heim joints for supports. So it'll be a whole ecosystem that we're developing to support this project, and hopefully will have some use outside of Corvettes only. We're going to do a version with two clevii as well as 1 clevis, so you'll be able to buy what you need and stick them wherever you can.
I didn't have to take the bumper off to install them but I have no headlights. In fact if you had a headlights in a C5 I don't see how you could install these where I did. Here's a couple of pics showing how that worked out. Just had a drill in there sideways and it took some doing but I pilot drilled them with a 3/16" drill, then went to a 1/2" drill, and then installed the nut serts. We'll also include drilling templates to help put the holes in the right place, as that's kind of important. To reiterate, this is a job that's going to take some elbow grease and you'll need to buy nutserts and the associated tools, but I ran at Mid Ohio two weeks ago and it's more than robust and the splitter comes off in 30 seconds.
Edit: Don't ask me why the eff Corvette Forum rotates my pictures in random ways. Sorry if you get a creak in your neck!
Last edited by Mark@AMT Motorsport; 04-24-2019 at 01:07 PM.
04-09-2019, 07:52 PM
Anyone here interested in a super robust splitter mounting system?
