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Installing Scuttle Vents

One of the best innovations out of Sollihul are scuttle vents.

I wish that 101's had them. I started out designing a few variations and decided that I did not have the tools necessary to make them. I search all over the place to find vents and finally found some that are used in rally cars. I got 2 of them to try out and will get two more to finish up the project.

	The vent is made of aluminum and features a mechanism that allows it to open either way.
	There is a rubber seal around the inside of the vent. With the raised lip and the seal, it shouldn't leak.
	Installation is pretty straight forward. The hard part is cutting the body. I have avoided any cutting so far, so this was tough for me. I traced the vent lid and made a template that I taped to the body and then traced the opening that I needed to cut.
	I cut the hole by drilling 4 holes at each corner and cutting with a jig saw.
	With the vent centered, I drilled 2 holes from the inside and then used them as anchors. I moved the vent outside and stuck 2 rivets in the holes and drilled the rest of the holes from the outside. The rivets I used are 3/16 aluminum pop rivets.
	I sealed the inside flange with silicone seal and then finished the rivets.
	Open forward.
	Open back.
	I used the same procedure to install one on the roof.
	Here's a shot of the top vent opened.
	Both vents open.
	Here is the vent closed from the inside. It doesn't interfere with anything and is not in the way.
	Here is the vent open. It is nicely out of the way.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Well, after testing the vents for a while, I thought I would update this to reflect what I found. I knew that the aerodynamics of the 101 were bad, but I didn't think that they were that bad.

The good:

The vents look good.
They will exhaust air from the cabin, pulling air out of the heater vent, which is good.

The bad:

The aerodynamics of the 101 are terrible. I thought there may be a problem ( I went through this with my window wings for air flow across the windows).
Even though the vent edge is 3 1/2 inches from the body, it will not snag fresh air. I stuck yarn around the vent on the body and drove around to see what the air flow looked like. Indeed, the yarn just spun around, indicating that there was low pressure, turbulent flow where the vent was.

The ugly:

I had to make a scoop to snag the horizontal air flow coming off of the front.
The first scoop was a prototype that was meant to test the feasibility of increasing air flow into the vent.
It was butt ugly, but it sure did work well. I got lots of fresh air flowing into the cabin and it was truly fabulous.
The next step was to make one that worked but not so ugly.

	The prototype vent is just plain ugly. It used existing holes that mounted the vent on, so no additional drilling was needed.
	Honkin big, but it sure works well.
	The redesigned scoop. It has a 9 sq inch area to pull air from the front and 9 sq inches back to the vent. It uses 2 of the original rivets, plus 2 #6 screws to hold it on.
	The size of it fits the vent better.
	Although it is only 1 x 9 inches, it flows plenty of air from the front to the vent. The front edge is 1/2 inch and bent in to catch the air.
	I will leave it on for a while and do some more testing. The top vent will be used to exhaust air from the cabin and the lower one to bring fresh air in.
	OK. I had to make some modifications to the vents. They would not flow enough air. I bent some 0.063 plate to fit and then used 3M epoxy tape to fix them in place. They actually look a lot better with the plate on.
	I added about 2 1/4 inch to the width of the vent.
	Here is the vent open.
	The edge is now 4 1/2 inches from the side of the vehicle.
	The top vent is even more problematic. Even with the same plate dimensions as the side vents, they would not flow air. I had to extend them twice in order to get adequate air flow.
	Here is the vent open and ready to go.
	And as it is seen from the outside.
	The top cover is eight inches. There are still a couple of minor modifiactions that are planned for next spring to optimize the flow. At least they work now and I can get a nice breeze.

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