One other thought...

the pics do not show the airflow at the back of the van. I would guess
that there is a bit of neg pressure there and large "eddies". One funny
experiment would be to mount a flat plate as a "splitter) back  there.
Sort of like a sheet of plywood mounted perp to the rear hatch, maybe
even 2 sheets in a cross or +  arrangement to reduce the large eddies
present to smaller ones.

But again, my experience in this sort of speculation makes me very
leery of making definite statements, statements that are so easily
confounded by empirical data. Or do some list members have access to
fluid dynamic modeling software and a big processor?

:)

Alistair

'82 westy, diesel converted to gas in '94

http://www.members.shaw.ca/albell/

On 18-Oct-04, at 2:01 PM, Malcolm Stebbins wrote:

> I have not been following this thread, but if you like pictures to go
> with the numbers, try this
> for a view of the airflow over various vanagons:
>
> http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/mwstebbins/
> detail?.dir=3415&.dnm=e349.jpg&.src=ph
>
>
>
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