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Old 01-11-2019, 03:11 PM   #166 (permalink)
aardvarcus
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Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: Evensville, TN
Posts: 676

Deep Blue - '94 GMC Suburban K2500 SLE
90 day: 23.75 mpg (US)

Griffin (T4R) - '99 Toyota 4Runner SR5
90 day: 25.43 mpg (US)
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Slowmover,

Thanks, I really appreciate all your posts, in this thread and others. I always make it a point to read them thoroughly. I won’t ever claim to be nearly as meticulous as you, but I try to be better than the average bear.

I intended to get a Tare number, but I wasn’t in the vehicle when they weighed it. I had gotten out to stand on my tippy toes to hit the button (placed at semi-truck height) to talk to an attendant and he pulled the weight with me standing on the platform. I will bring a stick with me next time. After leaving I started to realize many of the “extra” things I had forgotten to take out of the back seat and rear cargo area. Also my permanent onboard tool kit isn’t well thought out at this point, just a bunch of stuff I “might need” if something happens. I would prefer to whittle that down to mainly what I actually need with minimum duplication. I am sure I will re-weigh at some point in the future and will try to do a meaningful tare then.

I show the bare minimum weight more as a personal gauge on how I am doing on vehicle weight reduction efforts, I agree it isn’t helpful from a economy/loaded/towing perspective like a tare is. I agree on weight not being necessarily a direct MPG hit, but from a reliability, power, and hauling/towing perspective I would rather remove superfluous weight (e.g. fancy upholstered door trim) and have a lighter vehicle or reinvest it other places (e.g. heavier sway bar). Sometimes I think Chevy took “like a rock” a bit too seriously.

The feedback gauge is complicated by the fact that I don’t have a computer anymore in the vehicle. I removed it and rewired the vehicle to work without it. So there isn’t anything I can just plug in, as there is no plug. Once the new wears off of a modification I go back to weekly tanks and plot/trend over a long time period to see the changes evolve over time.

I would really like to do coil-overs in the front, eliminating torsion bars. I would definitely spring for legitimate shocks at that point. But since there isn’t a direct GMT400 kit for that that I am aware of that is a big custom project for much later in the future.
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slowmover (01-11-2019)