Watch This Hero Design And Build His Own Turbofan Wheels Instead Of Buying Them

Getting a sick set of wheels can transform the look of your ride. You might go with a clean, luxury look for a German sedan, or deep-dish rims with polished lips for a JDM build. If you’re really going for a hardcore racing-inspired look, though, you’ll want turbofans. The only thing is, they’re kind of hard to come by. So, if you can’t find turbofans to suit your car, what do you do? You make your own, of course!

What are turbofans? They’re a style of vented wheel cover designed to help cool a car’s brakes. They literally consist of vanes fitted to the wheel to create extra airflow to bring temperatures down and maintain braking performance. They became an icon of top-tier 1970s and 1980s race cars, perhaps most notable for starring on dominating Porsche 935 endurance racers. As is often the way, the race-spec parts became an iconic piece of street style. Today, turbofans are more often used as an aesthetic touch. Race cars have found other ways to cool brakes that don’t impact unsprung weight.

New Zealander Chris Watson wanted turbofans for a build, and whipped up an impressive set himself. The man behind Tofu Auto Works is an expert fabricator. In addition to his Nissan Stagea wagon wearing the face of a GT-R, he’s also well-known for his Cyberpunk Miata build. In fact, it’s so outrageous, it even won a contest to become a Hot Wheels model. Its aesthetic has morphed and changed over time, and today, it wears a sweet set of carbon fiber turbofans, of Watson’s own creation.

Watson’s turbofan setup relies on 15-inch wheel barrels as a base. It’s an ideal wheel size that perfectly suits the NA Mazda Miata. Only a handful of NA models got 15-inch wheels from the factory in a 15×6 sizing, but Watson’s pumped-guards demanded insanely-wide 13-inchers. Watson steps through the process of removing the wheel centers from his old steelies, and welding them at the right spot to get the fitment just so with the car’s existing pumped fenders. He even demonstrates a neat rig using skateboard wheels to grind them clean prior to priming and assembly.

With the wheels prepped, fabricating the turbofan covers themselves started with a 3D printer. Watson uses a Elegoo Neptune 3 Max for its sizable build plate, which makes printing larger parts easier. He has it set up with a large nozzle for printing large parts quicker, albeit at lower resolution.

The turbofans are modeled on a cyberpunk version of the wheel covers used on the Mazda 787B. Watson created the basic geometry using Fusion 360 CAD software, before using the printer to create test pieces for checking fitment with the wheels themselves. A simple flat wireframe section was enough to verify whether the design would fit the wheels. Only minor modifications were required to clear the barrels before going ahead to print the real thing.

The Neptune 3 Max has a print bed that’s 16.5 x 16.5 x 19.7 inches. It’s actually big enough to print the turbofans in a single piece. Sadly, it wasn’t that simple. Printing in a single piece would necessitate using support material to handle the center hub, which is difficult to remove and can mar the surface in the process. Instead, the outer section of the turbofans were printed face down, with the hub printed separately. In total, the two turbofans took about two and a half days to print. The two parts were then glued together with cyanoacrylate glue (also known as super glue), after an appropriate amount of sanding to prepare the surfaces for later finishing.

Once assembled, the fans were clamped to a wheel so the holes for the wheel studs could be drilled out. The holes are drilled large such that the wheel studs still mate directly onto the steel wheel. The turbofans are then attached to the wheels with smaller bolts via four separate holes.

Even just off the printer with a light sanding, the turbofans already look pretty sharp. However, Watson is a completionist. He designed flat cover plates to mate with the 3D-printed parts, to be made entirely out of carbon fiber. For an edgy look, he created a special “glitch carbon” finish by laying scraps of carbon fiber in different directions to create an effect not dissimilar to dazzle camouflage. He shares a tip that spray adhesive can be a great tool when working in this way, as it stops the carbon fiber from fraying when it’s being cut and arranged. Once laid up, the flat “glitch carbon” sheet was cured under vacuum to get the best possible finish.

Watson then designed and 3D printed templates to cut the covers out of the glitch carbon sheet. The templates were screwed on to mark out the lines accurately. Then, they were removed, and the parts cut out with an angle grinder. A sander was used for final finishing to get the parts nice and round. The inner and outer parts of the cover plates were then assembled using 3D-printed tabs.

Laying up carbon fiber on the 3D-printed turbofan sections was more challenging, but was key to adding strength to the parts. Watson demonstrates a useful technique where the carbon fiber is backed with a thin layer of fiberglass to hold it together while it’s shaped around the curved forms. Once cured, the 3D-printed sections needed the excess carbon removed and plenty of time on the sander to get them looking nice.

The parts were then treated to a clear coat, with Watson using a custom 2:1 mix of matt to gloss as he couldn’t find a satin clear coat when he needed one. Stick-on decals were then applied to the coverplates for a cyberpunk look. The shiny clean wheel barrels were then given a “weathering” treatment to make them look appropriately aged to fit the car’s dystopian aesthetic. The turbofans were then bolted to the wheels, and the coverplates installed on top with small bolts. It’s a temporary measure, as Watson plans to remake the coverplates later and then glue the better versions on permanently.

The turbofans look excellent mounted up, even if they’re not really intended to be functional in this case. From a looks perspective, the covers perfectly suit the Miata and the bleak future it appears to live in. Watson first installed the covers on the rear, but later took photos with the more traditional configuration, where the turbofans are fitted up front. This makes more sense from the perspective of cooling the brakes, even if Watson’s build is purely about the visual.

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What about weight, you ask? The final assembled turbofans came in at 4 pounds and 5 pounds respectively. The difference is largely down to one of the coverplates being vacuum bagged, and the other created using a wet layup with more layers of fiber and more epoxy. That’s a lot of unsprung weight to add to the car, in addition to the heavier wheels and tires. Watson isn’t concerned, though. His build is about form, not function, so he’s not sweating a loss of lap time or decreased performance from the suspension.

The final product almost has us wanting to build a set of our own, if we hadn’t just watched how difficult and time-consuming it was to build them. In any case, it’s a testament to Watson’s skills as a craftsperson that they came out looking so damn good.

Image credits: Tofu Auto Works via YouTube screenshot