Quote:
Originally Posted by coltonandrew
Onto my question: I totally removed my truck bed and topper and have gone from 100 miles per quarter tank to 170 miles per quarter tank (small engines greatly benefit from weight reduction, this reduction equaled -500lbs)
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I thought about this later and thought "You could only go a hundred miles per tank?!" Quarter-tank!
With a curb weight of 2,788 pounds, you removed about eighteen percent of the weight. In order to see a 70% decrease in fuel usage with an 18% fuel reduction, you would have had a terrible power-to-weight ratio, or there are confounding ratios.
Of course, fuel gauges are not very accurate, but hopefully they would be less than 44% off (1.7/1.18, your mileage improvement divided by your weight reduction). Please consider sending a private message to
Fuel Economy, Hypermiling, EcoModding News and Forum - EcoModder.com - View Profile: JellyBeanDriver to order an MPGuino in order to have an accurate measurement of your mileage. I highly respect my associates on here and everyone seems to agree that an MPGuino is more accurate than dividing your mileage by how much fuel you pumped.
As for the template, please take a picture of your truck (hopefully not in grass!) and upload it here:
Aero Template Overlay ver.0.6.2-alpha
This is an example:
Maybe another day I would have "photochopped" off the bed, but the weight reduction would change its angle, this is not accurate for you.
Just try to make sure that your wheels are level when you use the tool and if you try to build according to the template, that just seems complicated, because you would add weight back, but less, so if you are serious about it, I would plan it out the best that you can, figure out all of the materials that you need, and then take a picture with that stuff sitting on the back of the truck, weighing it down about as much it should when finished.
Please note that the Template is only really useful for the top. Please look at what I did for my Forester--as a joke:
Also, you would want to taper in the sides accordingly.
Did I create more questions than I answered?