[ps2fixer]

Fixed half of the glow plugs (driver's side). Had 1 bad, 1 with no connection. Other 2 worked but replaced anyway with new. Didn't have the 8th one so didn't do passenger side yet. Block heater cord came today as well as the massive upgrade solenoid for the glow plugs.

I got to use the truck as a truck on Sunday, 220 miles to pickup another f250 diesel for parts for my dad. Paid $1050 for it, not too bad for a nearly complete truck (top of cab cut off). 220 loaded miles and could barely tell the truck was back there, just started out in first instead of 2nd (no throttle needed still) and big hills I had to down shift for at 60mph. Drove 60mph to and back on the express way except on the way home there was a section of really bad ice for about 5 miles that I went around 30-35mph. Truck was hauled backwards on a dolly, so not really ideal for mpg. Anyway, filled the tanks today and did the math.... 23.66mpg, not bad! There's only 4 active people with diesel trucks, but I'm currently at #2, #1 sounds to be a really small truck. Wish I had instant feedback for mpg, the scan gauge xgauges worked well, but it couldn't calculate the mpg sadly. Truck seems to run better the more I drive it, that or I'm just getting used to it.

I have new fluids coming for it, almost $200 to replace everything with synthetic and I still have to grab the engine oil which will be another around $100. Not 100% sure how I really want to go for long term with oil since it has the HEUI system the engine oil needs to be kept top notch or they could get sticky or build up material inside the injectors.

Overall, I'm quite happy with the manual gearing with 3.55 axles, good mpg for long trips, yet plenty of low gear for working with loads. Get things 100% with the turbo and it should have more power at lower rpm. The scan gauge shows I get nearly no boost till I hit 2000rpm+. At 60mph 5th gear I'm seeing roughly 2psi of boost, on a hill it jumps to 3-4psi. Heavy take off and high rpm (over 3000rpm) I think we saw about 14psi, but at those levels the flow is so great the leak isn't as noticeable I'm sure.

Kind of funny my target was 25mpg and I got really close to that in winter with a boost leak, and about 1/3 the tank was loaded miles, also still have 2 bad glow plugs for the cold starts and no block heater. With the results I see, on longer trips with some areo mods I think I could hit 30mpg somewhat easily. Oh, also the front tank wasn't 100% full for the last fill up so the mpg should be slightly better than the reported number. Both tanks this time are completely full so the next fill up should be a lot more accurate.

Truck still has a vibration at 45mph, have to diag exactly what it is since most of the U-joints are replaced. Have one in the rear drive shaft that wasn't changed (right on transfer case), and the front axle u joints aren't good but truck is in 2wd and hubs unlocked so it shouldn't be turning ideally but very well possible that's the cause of it.

This is making me want to swap my car over to a small diesel, maybe a small diesel pickup. I suspect something like a Toyota Tacoma with a 1.9L TDI VW engine could hit 40mpg pretty easily, maybe 50mpg with me behind the wheel.

We didn't throw the tuner on the truck for the trip, my dad thought about it but I figured with the boost leak it wouldn't help and probably just waste fuel. Now I'm wondering if the tune would help the mpg. Generally the first or second setting up from stock gives the best mpg, atleast for the automatic trucks. My dad's went from like 15mpg to around 18mpg and he wasn't driving his truck for mpg at all back then with 4.10 gearing.

Anyway, I was hoping to hit around 20mpg before fixing the truck up 100%, hopefully I can squeeze out a bit more with the new fluids and get some basic eco mods done.

I haven't searched it out, but I wonder if there's a way to get the scan gauge to be happy with these trucks to give an instant mpg readout (or any kind of fuel over time type of measurement). Worst case I could build something on my laptop and use it for data logging and such, but ideally would be to use the smaller scan gauge.


I scanned over some ecomodder truck owners in the garage section of the site. Any of them that were getting around 18mpg+ were manual diesels for f250 and f350. The highest average truck I see is around 27mpg, next best is low 20's. The 27mpg truck has pretty extreme mods done to it including an external overdrive unit (double overdrive) and a lot of areo etc mods. I'm sure it will be a solid fight to try to get 30mpg within my limits (no lowering the truck etc). Pretty interesting to see I'm performing pretty well as purely a driver and no real mods on the truck besides the bumper if you wanted to call that a mod.