by NowForThe5th on Mon Jan 19, 2015 6:59 am
Clearly I've been outvoted by the certified practicing automotive engineers in our community, but I'm dumb enough to have one more try.
If you take a bar off a car, any car, and drive it around, sooner or later the cops will pull you up and defect you. Why? For the reasons I outlined above.
Yes, it's just a piece of plastic and yes, it's just held on with a few screws and/or clips. But it has a purpose and that is to absorb some of the impact in a collision. Maybe not much but you'd be surprised how fast you need to be travelling before an impact gets past a plastic bar to the reinforcing bar underneaath. Not point impacts, but an impact spread across a large part of the bar, as in hitting another car. If the plastic bar can absorb 5, or even 10km/h off the impact speed then it's done its job of impact absorption.
If you cut the bottom off a bar you remove the attachment points that it has and its shape, no longer a cone, won't do the job it was intended, designed to do. So, a 40km/h impact speed is still 40km/h when it hits the reo, not 35km/h. That transfers all the way through and, ultimately it's your legs or your chest that have to absorb that extra 5km/h.
The other side of the coin is what it might do to the other vehicle. By not spreading the impact, the way that the plastic bar would do, means that much greater forces are applied to a much smaller area on the other vehicle and that has implications for the way that its design is intended to work. So the risk is increased for the occupants of both vehicles.
You may have noticed that vehicles in Europe, and other places, are not even allowed to have bullbars like we have here. They have high risk of animal strike too - deer, moose and the like. But the registration authorities won't allow any changes at all, even to bars like those we can buy. Same reasoning.
If you were to add an extension to the bash plate, how would the front of it end? Just a flat piece of plate bolted to what's left of the plastic bar? Useless in terms of strength since the plastic bar was never intended to have a chunk of steel or aluminium attached to it there. And would the end just be cut straight? That would be like having a knife blade on the front of your car if you hit a pedestrian.
Not finished in a straight cut but turned up? So what are you going to attach it to? The plastic bar? See above for useless. Maybe the reinforcing bar? How? Not allowed to drill holes in it or weld to it. Cable ties maybe?
Look, I've resorted to being a smartarse to bring some emotion into my argument, but I'm 100% right. If bar chops were a viable alternative I could think of a dozen vehicles that would need one more than a Triton. Yet, you never see a bar chop. Ever wondered why that might be?
Chris
If work is so terrific, why do they have to pay us to do it?