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I am making a custom cutout for an upcoming cooling kit that we are currently testing. The kit will have the option to not cut, and use fans (which works surprisingly well) but there will still be people who want to do the cutout. Nothing currently on the market appeals enough for me to cut holes in my front bumper cover, so after asking others to please come up with something better, I finally threw in the towel and will give this deal a whirl myself...
i am creating a fiberglass mold relief of the c7 front end. This will work on all z06, grand sport, and stingrays. I am going to build on top of that mold, and then cut out around the perimeter, and it will sit right on the car, on the fiberglass for assessment. then I will have the piece 3D scanned, and in CAD, have the drivers side created as a perfect mirror object. Then I will have the molds created.
I may decide to sell this in the future. Just know, it is going to be a complex piece, with dive planes on each side (this was another goal of mine, and the dive planes, without a cutout, look bad IMO. So i realized the 2 should be symbiotic.
Below are some rough sketches, and then some other photos of the fiberglass progress last night and today.
If you have a sketch you think might look great, please submit it. Please include a dive plane, otherwise, i most likely will not consider it for my project But still cool to see other's ideas also.
one thing I am sure of, I will make the carbon fiber or carbon flash colored material it is made out of... wrap around to the inner edge of the brake duct intake. It will match up seamlessly against the carbon flash brake duct lip. I realize on the stingrays, the grill is there, i will make a more trimmed part for the stingrays if we decide to produce and sell them.
By wrapping the material around, it makes it very difficult to notice it is an aftermarket piece... same on the dive plane, it will look just how GM does on the camaro zl1 1le.
And then the high side of the opening, i will have it come out like a sword/blade shape, so that once again, it does not just look like a half baked aftermarket duct slapped on a hundred thousand dollar car.
I really like the idea of incorporating a vent into an ACR/ZL1 1LE style canard/dive plane
Thank you buddy, dont know how i didn't think of it sooner, probably because i pay no attention to camaros. I was literally searching for an existing dive plane to buy, to be able to use as a guide for what im making, and thats when i noticed the camaro's.
Had i paid attention to this idea sooner, i probably would have done this already, as of a year or 2 ago.
I agree with you, which is why i spent the most time on those myself... but i am not sure that I will do the wing across the middle. A lot of work... but we will see, maybe it will get easier as i get the hang of it. Mold off the car... and somehow the bad GM paint managed to stay on the bumper cover. Miracles.
Keep in mind, all the sketches, all of them should have 2 lines connecting to the brake duct location... as ive realized that is the way to do it... so you can also mix match them, and say you like the height of one, but like the brake duct location of the other. I am still debating how big or small i want the hole to be.
White places are still smooth, not as bad as they look. I was spooked to put resin directly onto the tape on the bumper before the first layer of glass was put down so i put the glass down first and added the resin on top of it. I dont need to make a perfect relief mold... so i did not care. I just need a bumper to be able to chop a hole in and add the clay... or as my friends call it, play-doh... Wishful thinking
blue tape is just scraps and me being too lazy to pull it off before i took the pic.
Guess who is back, back again. And putting his money where his mouth is!
I think the all make the front end of the car look like it is smiling. BUT a 2d line ontop a 3d object is hard to get a true sense of how it will look in person.
yeah, similar to the camaro, that is the photo i have above, a close up of the camaro's intakes and dive plane. The intake hole will be much wider though.
I will draw up a more detailed idea over the mold soon, been a busy morning
yeah, similar to the camaro, that is the photo i have above, a close up of the camaro's intakes and dive plane. The intake hole will be much wider though.
I will draw up a more detailed idea over the mold soon, been a busy morning
Big consideration is how the dive planes roll back to the wheel wells, and how that interfaces with stg 2 and stg 3 aero
Big consideration is how the dive planes roll back to the wheel wells, and how that interfaces with stg 2 and stg 3 aero
I agree with you. My thoughts have been, if a person is trying to cool their vette down and adding heat exchangers to the front... then they are obviously driving the car fast. If they are driving in a straight line, they probably are not overheating.. because there is no logical reason to go straight fast, endlessly, and even if there is, you wont be overheating... not enough that you would need to cut holes for the heat exchangers to get wind, the HX would work fine boxed in with the stock nose.
So, its logical, that the only way a person is going to need to cut holes in their front end, is if they, option 1 want to drive around curves fast on a road course, or option 2, they want to show off. The guys who want to show off, i could care less about their car's balance, they don't drive fast enough for it to matter.
So option 1 guys, roadcourse guys... currently, i see a lot of cars with the big wings on them, including the zr1 etc. I dont believe chevy has made a strong enough front splitter yet, that matches up with those big wings. So I think the rest is self explanatory, the dive planes, plus a splitter, will better balance the car from its current setups with large wings.
The dive planes, I am looking into having different stages, and have them where they can be swapped out on the fly, so a person could have 2 sets, 1 very aggressive that stick out far, or another set that dont stick out far. The wings will attach and detach from the opening in the nose. That is why i am building everything at once.
Realistically, i wanted dive planes more than i wanted a hole in the nose... but once i realized i could make the hole look better than anything currently on the market, i realized, it might not be a bad option to explore. It also gives structural re-enforcement to the dive planes from the buildup of the duct.
The long short of it is... the guys who need a hole in the nose for cooling... are the same guys who already need dive planes. So it all just makes too much sense not to do it this way.
as far as the cars smiling... i get what you are saying, but understand, dive planes are in the shape of a smile... so unless i have a hole go under the dive plane, towards the bottom of the car... the shapes are all going to be a smile in some way or another.
And point blank, im probably not going to have the hole go under the dive plane, it makes zero sense, ive lost my structure the dive plane needs to be held up by. So be happy the cars are happy
so, im wrestling with how big to make the opening. I'll give a couple teaser pieces of info to what we already have... we have setrab pro level thickness 12.2x12" CORE SURFACE AREA (not counting the brackets on the coolers, which have to be trimmed btw) black heat exchangers on each side, probably bigger height and width than anyone has done before while also keeping the brake ducts in tact. So with our current setup, if the opening was as big in the picture below, all you would see is black HX cooler on both sides. White lines represent where the surface is curling away from us. The top edge will be like a sword blade sticking out, so at this height, this sword is almost like a front bumper on the natural seam of the front bumper cover. The bottom front of the opening, toward the center of the car where it comes to a sharp point... that will recess downward early on, it will only be flush with the body work for an inch or so, and then will go downward and eventually wrap underneath where the white lines indicate.
You have the opportunity here to not have it look like **** (like another vendor). I like what I see so far, GO MIKE!
Compliments from you and I mean a lot John, because we always tell the truth As i was doing this, i started thinking "maybe i should just make a whole new nose for the car" but then i realized it would be impossible to mold, so that made me feel more confident I am on the right track. This is going to be something that will bring the car more value at resale is my hope and goal im working toward.
Frustrating thing is when the big shops just come along and copy after i do all the hard work brainstorming. I'm surprised you dont like the other shops shapes. Square is a corvette theme I'll have to find the thread from a year ago where people were brainstorming and asking for other options, and one vendor kept reposting the photo of his cutout over and over.
People were like... "yeah... we saw it the first time." It was not even from another angle, just the same photo. SQUARE... SQUARE... SQUARE... HOW DO YOU LIKE MY SQUARE!? They have the money and have had the time, and an attitude that if you dont like their stuff, go pound sand, they aren't changing. So be it. I warned them, ignore me, and make me create, and I will become your competition. Its very simple.
Anyway, back to work, more drawings... Ive changed my mind a 1000 times on how to do it as I keep looking at it closer. For every 1 drawing i put up, i have 100 other variations in between. I keep checking the inside of the actual nose and seeing how all of this is going to line up and the ducts inside are going to work. Its going to be pretty cool when its done i think.
02-21-2019, 03:03 PM
Vote on the new cutout shape...
But still cool to see other's ideas also.
