(I ramble in the below post, read at your own peril.)
Well, I finally gave up on the aluminum rims that came with the Hankook
MT tires I bought off Craigslist, and ended up mounting them on the
factory chrome rims on my '95 Sport. Not optimal but it'll work. I'm
definitely going back to AT tires from MTs after this, I drove from
Spokane to Colfax and back today and nearly went deaf on the concrete
sections, and the Hankooks are supposed to be some of the quietest MT
tires around. I'd hate to hear a loud one! Makes me almost want the
extra weight of sound deadening the '97 up models have. ;)
This was after installing the MP PCM I ordered ($251 plus shipping from
http://www.mopartsracing.com/). I got about 17mpg average there and
back, A/C on with a strong headwind on the way back, cruise control on
the entire time. Not too bad considering the route, it goes through
what's known as the "Palouse" region of Washington state. The road
almost never goes straight as it winds along old properly lines for
farmland, and flat land in the Palouse is near impossible to come by.
The contours of the land were formed during the last ice age when
Glacial Lake Missoula's ice dam broke and flooded from Montana to the
Pacific ocean in a massive wave several times over a couple thousand
years. (See
http://www.uwsp.edu/geo/projects/geoweb/participants/dutch/VTrips/Scablands0.HTM)
From the air the entire area looks like huge sand ripples on the bottom
of a river -- because that's what the hills are on a massive scale,
ripples formed by a wall of water 150 feet deep in the shallows, *1,000
feet deep* in some places, moving at up to *80mph* over the plains. Yikes.
With the MP PCM climbing up these hills it almost never even kicked out
of torque converter lockup, much less out of overdrive. I was
impressed. The F-250 behind me definitely had more problems with the
hills than I did, he'd drop back 4-5 car lengths every time we hit a
hill, only to come back up and tailgate me on the downhill sections.
I can't say I'm fond of the cruise control on my '95, it seems really
aggressive with the throttle. Maybe it's just the torque of the 318
kicking you in the back when the cruise control kicks the throttle in
when the speed drops, but I bet I could get 18-19mpg on that trip if I
handled the throttle manually. Of course I'm too lazy to do that. ;)
MattB
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Oct 01 2009 - 00:37:49 EDT