Progress on the fairing

Mike and I made substantial progress on the new fairing design. More Pictures
This fairing is being built for Mike's Catrike Speed. The Catrike poses a particular challenge for coroplast fairings because of its reclined seat position. Its usually hard to see over a fairing that doesn't hit your knees.

To solve this dilemma, we put a sight channel down the middle that lowers the fairing by 3.5" between your knees. The nails in the picture are just temporarily holding the coroplast to the aluminum frame. Besides dealing with the sight line issue, our other goal was to build this front fairing out of a single 4x8 recycled political sign.

The final challenge was to see if we could successfully copy Ethan Davis's fairing mount. Ethan developed a very clever design that has a jaw that clamps down on a bracket attached to the fairing frame. This makes a secure mount which with a push from your toe releases the fairing for transport or in case you just want to ride unfaired for a while.

Building the front fairing

The front fairing is built out of coroplast. Sometimes called corrugated plastic it's waterproof and light weight. As you can see from the ribs of the fairing I used recycled signs for the parts that wouldn't show. The basic skeleton consists of a coroplast bulkhead in the front and then about 18" to 20" behind in a second inverted U shaped piece of coroplast. Finally to add stealth there is an inverted U of 3/8" aluminum tubing that when the fairing is closed fits into a space on the cross bar of the trike next to where the seat attaches.
Here's the fairing skeleton from the front showing the bulkhead and ribs. All of this started as a large drawing on flip chart paper to figure out knee and toe clearances. I then cut out the drawing and traced it on to the coroplast.
Here's the fairing half assembled at the NE electrovelo event in Maine. I had hoped to have the fairing finished for the event. Then I had the crazy idea that I would work on it up there giving a live demo of how to build one of these. It was way too windy and there were too many other cool vehicles to try out. That's me in the formula 1 type electric racer and my son clowning in my half done trike.
Here it is making taped together prior to hot gluing. The fairing is held together with pieces of scored coroplast which enables one to fold the coroplast into an L. Using these L shaped pieces the outer shell is hot glued to the ribs underneath. Preeating the pieces to be glued with a hair drier seams to make a better more durable bond.
Sorry, for some reason this picture comes out sideways. Tip your head to the right for the proper orientation. If you click on the picture you'll get a larger view clearly showing the small scored pieces of coroplast hot glued to the underside of the fairing to hold it all to gether. To finish off the outside I used red electical tape to cover and seal the joints.

Another sideways picture. Tip your head to the left this time for the proper view. As you can see the fairing tips forward for easy entry to the trike. The video clip to the right shows how the fairing lifts forward.