Thanks! I take pride in Car's "intentionally unfinished" look on the patches and mods. If I'm not going to take the time and money to make everything look stock, it might as well look so bad it's good. *grin* I really don't want to try matching Car's color, and I think a not-quite-matching-and-likely-to-fade brown would look worse than bare sheet metal.
One of the reasons I got my current tires was that they had max 44 psi, so that's what I'm running them at.
A problem I've noticed though is that the centerline of the front tires seem to be wearing down a bit more than either the outside or inside edges. I've seen other people say that they've never experienced uneven or increased wear, but maybe that's because their tires are more narrow? Stock tires on Car are 185/70R14. Next time I need tires I'll be getting 175/70R14 HTR T4's. (I'm having trouble finding narrower tires than that for 14" rims that are still all-seasons and -also- don't sacrifice tire radius by a decreased height/width ratio) A centimeter narrower and 7psi higher than my current tires.
I tried to stick around 60mph on the way out, when I could. I-44, though, in Missouri into Oklahoma, is
insane. I'm not exaggerating when I say that traffic even in the slow lane on that highway tends to move about 85mph, at least at the time of day I went through. And even when it wasn't congested, it seemed like people tended to drive beside each other, not planning ahead at all for slower traffic in the slower lane, so that I constantly had cars and pickups riding up on my bumper. I sped up more than a little there, but still didn't suffer much in fuel economy according to the fill-ups.
I'm thinking the gas through Indiana and Missouri is just better for high mileage. Or maybe they've already switched to summer gas, whereas PA hasn't. Who knows, I'm not about to take samples of gasoline to have it analyzed.
