bike to work day 2012

Infinity Miles Per Gallon

by Bakari Kafele on May 14, 2012

Question:
What can you do to absolutely minimize your fuel use?

 

Click here for the answer

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Jacob Aziza / Bakari Kafele; Ecomodder / Hypermiler

by Bakari Kafele on May 2, 2012

Good morning fellow ecomodders, hypermilers, and efficiency enthusiasts of all kinds.

The EcoModder blog has been inactive for over a year (save Tim’s two most recent updates), and I have been asked to help pick it up again.

So, since I also have not been active on this site for nearly a year, to start I thought I would re-introduce my self:

My name is Bakari Kafele.  My internet screen name (or at least one of them) is Jacob Aziza.
You may remember me from such internet sites as the EcoModder Forum and Instructables.com

I have an old (1983) full-size truck with a 6.9L diesel V8 that I use for deliveries and hauling and occasionally towing.  It would be a monstrosity for a commuter vehicle, but it’s about the smallest thing that could serve my work needs – most people hauling loads heavy loads (see below) would use a box truck, a flat bed, or maybe even a dump truck.

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At the very least an F-350 or equivalent.
So, depending on how you look at it, getting 15 miles per gallon, (as I was five years ago), could be considered decent, given the type of work being asked of this old truck – 15 mpg being what I measured I was getting, which coincided more or less with what most people report getting in the same make model and year truck.

Then, in 2008, I read an article about Wayne Gerdes.
Click here to read the rest

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Alternator delete with lithium and lead acid battery

April 23, 2012

EcoModder forum member, Brucepick has been working on an interesting alternator delete for a while now. He wanted to eliminate the load on the alternator, but didn’t like the idea of just replacing the starting battery with a deep cycle lead acid battery. The downside of doing this is that as the battery discharges the [...]

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CigaR007′s Grill Block Evolution

April 16, 2012

EcoModder forum user CigaR007 has been working on grill blocks for his Toyota Echo for a while now. He started with some simple pipe insulation stuffed between the grill slats as shown above. This version worked well for him and didn’t look bad either as it matched the car’s grill color fairly well. It was [...]

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116 mpg from a modified Kawasaki Ninja 250: Alan Smith – Accomplished Motorcycle Hypermiler & Vetter competitor

April 9, 2012

Originally posted by low & slow on the EcoModder forum. There has been quite a bit of interest in Alan Smith, an accomplished motorcycle hypermiler and Vetter Challenge competitor, so I drafted some questions for him to answer. Following are the questions and his responses. Alan, please tell us about yourself, your work history, and [...]

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Summerizing Your Car EcoModder Style

April 2, 2012

A while back I wrote a blog article on how to winterize your car ecomodder style. Now that its spring again I figured a nice topic would be how to summerize your vehicle for better fuel economy. So, here are some tips that the guys from the forum and I came up with: Install summer [...]

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ScanGauge-E Review and Comparison

November 2, 2011

A few months back, Darin and Ben (EM’s founders) asked me to review the new ScanGauge-E. I gladly accepted and tried it out for a few weeks. You can see the full review here. For the blog we’ll keep it short and to the point. First up, we’ll look at some of the limitations of [...]

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The Makings of a Pickup Aerocap: T Vago’s Dakota

August 9, 2011

For the last several months, Ecomodder forum member t vago has been working on a custom aeroshell for his 2000 Dakota Quad Cab pickup truck. While many fuel conscious people will look down on pickup trucks as eminently wasteful, truck owners are a group that has uniquely embraced the spirit of ecomodding. After all, they represent [...]

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