I finally got tired of the air slapping the back of my head at anything over 30 mph, and decided to build one of those cool back-seat air blockers like those you might see on Boxters and Z-3's.
My criteria were:
1. It had to be substantially strong
2. It should not interfere with the top or mechanism
3. It should be easily removeable
4. It should "blend in" with the rest of the styling
5. It had to fit inside my existing roll bar
6. It had to work (i.e; vastly reduce the wind buffets from the rear)
After expirementing with a couple of mesh versions, I went with a piece of clear, 1/4" thick plexiglass for strength and stiffness. To hold in in, I went to a local auto-glass supplier and got an 8 ft. long piece of the corrugated "U" channel commonly used for the guides on door glass, to allow it to glide easily up and down (see figure 1). This channel is about 1/4" wide, and 1/2" tall, has black fabric on the outside and has some fuzzy material on the inside to cushion the glass. It is quite flexible and retains its' shape once bent. It also holds the glass snugly in place without rattling at all.
I made a template of the glass from an old piece of paneling, cutting it to closely fit the inside bends of the CMC roll bar, but giving it a gap of 1/8" all around to allow the channel to fit, too.
I then bent the channel to fit the template such that it fit snugly, and then attached the channel to the inside of the roll bar by drilling and tapping 8-32 holes along the channel length (spaced every 6 inches, closer on the corners) and guided along the pipe centerline by a line drawn along the template, earlier.
Once the channel was attached, I again fitted the template, trimming a bit here and there to make it fit evenly on both sides (I used the spot where my tonneau cover circles the roll bar tube as a reference point) (see figure 2).
For the rest of the story, see the next post:
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