Originally Posted by
hotbike
After I posted my reply, I looked closer at the sidebar to the left of the article, and the other items, and I realized this was a spoof
It may have been a spoof (and the "freedom blades" strongly suggested such) but such products do exist, and people often do make their own.
Originally Posted by
turbo1889
Only weighs an ounce or two at most, round profile is actually fairly aerodynamic and its soft and won't do any actual damage to a car that brushes it.
I do agree that if you're making your own, a fun noodle is great -- highly visible, bends easily, soft, etc.
However,
a round profile is not particularly aerodynamic, though it's certainly better than a square one.
This video describes aerodynamics of various shapes. In general (I read this somewhere else, not this video), if a rectangular shape had a cross section of a given size and it had a given drag, you could reduce that drag by one half (50%) by having the same cross section but a rounded shape. (This would be an approximation of our fun noodle.)
However, if you kept the same cross section and had a standard airfloil shape, the drag reduced by a factor of
10 (and I don't remember if this was a factor of 10 better than the rounded shape or the rectangular shape.)
If you want your fun noodle to be aerodynamic, whittle it down to an airfoil shape and make sure the ends are smooth as well -- but the flexibility of the noddle is going to mess with that shape, and I'm not sure how effective this will really be.
Though really ... if you put this sort of thing on your bike, in general aerodynamics aren't a large concern. But the fun noodle
will add a considerable amount of drag.