hi all, i discovered this amazing site a few weeks ago and it was just the push i needed to start doing the moddings i always had in the back of my mind.
i live in belgium and i drive a nissan kingcab pick-up from 2002 that i bought on ebay 3 years ago for a verry interesting price. it's a 2.5l diesel and im verry happy with it as me and my father run a farm it is a verry practical vehicle. we can carry lighter things around with it, where before we would had to use a tractor with a trailer weighing together over 13 tons empty... obviously i admit i like to use it for anything, even when a car could do the same. so that's why id like to give myself and my wallet a better conscience by making it as efficient as possible.
up to now i had trouble staying under 10 liters/100 km, and the first things i did was remove the 4 lights on the roof (yeah i know...) re-install the aluminium bed cover i made, wich we sometimes need to remove and oftenly forget to replace. and i also removed the 4 mudflaps behind each wheel. since then i have almost done 2 tanks, and the resulst are obvious, i used to have real trouble doing 700km/tank and now i can reach 800 km! so im doing around 8.7 liters/100 km. it's an improvement of over 1 liter with adjustments that took 20 minutes to do.
my goal is to reach 7 liters, i have now made a steamlined bed cover out of wood wich is not yet completely finished, of wich i will show pictures the coming days. i also intend to make a front splitter and do anything else that the experienced memebrs here may advise.
story of the vehicle
for those who are interested) the first years i had it i used to drive "gently" mainly with the intention to spare the mechanics as i have some knowledge in that domain and because i do the maintenance myself
. and i guess that being carefull with the car mechanics automatically gets you better effeciency already.
for 1 year it drove on 10-30% rapeseed oil, wich we produced ourselves by pressing some of our rapeseed. it went really well but i stopped because of 2 events: i once got pulled over by the customs for a routine fuel check to see if nobody was running on heating diesel, and because the sample they took was suspicious i had to wait 30 mins with them and sign some papers and they would check the sample in a lab. the worst is that the freeking custom agants werent even aware that driving on vegetable oil is legal in belgium if it is produced by a farmer. and for 30 minutes all the other dozens of persons they pulled over took me for a frauder in my own village. so you try to "save the planet" and the police makes you look like a thief...
and the second event is that at the annual technical control of the 4x4 i had a horrible particle emission, so i went to a garage and they found nothing, then i went back to the control and the result was the same... to make a long story short, the filter of the fuel pump was clogged by rapeseed debris, BUT! it only has effect when your rpm goes over 4500! and i never go over 3000, but the damn controllers push the pedal down to the floor. so we don't use our oil anymore untill we can filter it better.