Garage Lessons
I haven’t had any time to test aerodynamic modifications over the past several weeks because I’ve been busy dealing with other maintenance issues—completely new brakes on the truck (if you’ve never seen inside a 30-year-old drum with all its original hardware and shoes, hoo boy) and bad wheel bearings on the Prius. But I have had time while I worked to think about lessons from these other aspects of vehicle engineering that might apply to how we think about the process of aerodynamic modification. If You Want It Done Right, Do It Yourself I last had my Prius aligned several years ago. At the time, the tech said they had to shim one rear wheel to get it in spec and I thought nothing of it. Fast forward to last week, when I had to replace that wheel bearing: the shims (two stacked on top of each other) were spacing it out from the axle, and as a result the bearing wasn’t even seated in the housing—it fell off in my hand when I removed the four retaining bolts. I put the new bearing