[slowmover]

Thanks. In return I’m well past being able to do what you’re doing. It’s now in my past.

I’d stick with the torsion bar. If a later version has rack & pinion steering that could be swapped, that’d be great (My one ton CTD is coil IFS w/ rack & pinion). Makes a pickup into a sports car.

A few hundred pounds of interior items removed for MPG won’t justify removal. Sound & vibration is very wearing. A gasser would be different.

CAT Scale has a phone app. Do it all with that. Each location has ID number.

You want to get old school on feedback, here’s how it was done on a big block gasser tow vehicle:

In a fabricated sheet metal gauge cluster housing:

0-5000 rpm tachometer
Vacuum gauge
Marine fuel flow meter
Airspeed Indicator

(Also present were a marine-quality compass, an altimeter/barometer and dial-face outside thermometer).

One mounted this on the dash ahead of the driver. Canted gauges so that “up” reading was the tested ideal at a given road speed (the serious guys used a calibrated MOTOROLA “Lodax” speedometer). The discussions were around figuring “Percent Engine Load”. One could modify travel speed upwards based on real-time data and retain same MPG. Or, cut road speed to heighten re-fuel travel distance (there weren’t filling stations every five miles back then).

Expensive fun for retired guys (WWI generation; started at Model T and ended at 7-liter V8s to tow the Airstream. On brand-new Interstates, no less).

Re-engineering the carbureted fuel system for reliability (HIGHLY consistent performance) was even more interesting.


The man’s way to get cross-country circa 1969. Unit-body, torsion-bar suspension, and far ahead of the competition:

L