Well, I took a test drive this afternoon and I must say that I am very happy with how the car performed. Very happy to be honest.
Notice the name change of the thread, this is because of the adjustments that I made to the size of the sheild and the addition of some foam (more on that in a second).
Ok, well I still had the sheild fitted from this morning and since I had to go make a run to the store soon, I might as well find something that would work well as an insulator around the edges. Since being laid off from my job, I had several none-working SCSI harddrives laying around and I noticed the foam inside the box. Believe it or not, it fit perfectly around the sheild with only a few minor altercations. Once fitted, it worked perfectly. Well, as good as I would hope anyway. I really did not expect much, I just wanted to see what would happen.
Well, after a nice 32 mile (round trip) ride to the store, I got out and checked the filter. by touching it, and it was COLD!! The sheild was hot as hell, but the filter was cold or at least very close to ambient temp. I didn't get it though, because I left the car running while I was in the store, so there was some serious heat built up in that sheild! Leaving the town I was in, there's 5 four way stops and my high speed fans were on the whole time. so I know there was some serious heat floating around it, at least.
Well, all this is not very scientific, but I could actually feel a difference in how the car responded after after driving in the slower areas, where heat can build up. I am going to ask around to some of the neighbors and see if they have a digital cooking themomator. That way I will have a pretty accurate reading of where everything is, temp wise.
I want everyone to know that I'm not trying to pump this sheild up or anything, because it is far from being a finished product. I still have some pretty serious changes to make. I'm just so stoked at the fact that I actually made something like this and it actually works! Remember, at the beignning of this thread I said that I have never done anything like this, so... I'm pretty happy right now. Thanks to everyone that has contributed to this project.
So the next steps is to get some material and get a few of these out to a few folks and see what they think. Order some of the ceramic coating and apply it to one and take some readings after that. Make whatever adjustments are needed based on the feedback I get from the test mules and I guess it's on from there.
