2007 GMC Canyon - It begins ;-)

[oil pan 4]

You may want to devise a way to quickly remove it too. My 9 inch air dam is held on with six 10mm bolts.
I made the lower part of mine out of lawn edging plastic and it has lasted almost 2 years, its getting rough around the bottom and it wouldn't hurt to replace it.

The greatest concentration of people who have added, extended or made their own air dam aka chin spoilers on trucks and SUVs will be found right here.

[Longsnowsm]

Well I think all the pieces and parts are here now for the various projects on the truck. I patched up a chipped up spray in liner that had gotten kind of bad with some aerosol spray in bed liner once I hand sanded out the surface rust on the spots that were chipped and rusting. Then I put in a drop in bed liner to try and protect the bed from the elements. I will be putting a tonneau cover over that, but hopefully this will help prevent the rust from coming back and ensure that the bed isn't damaged due to all the work I make the truck do.

I also got the bed rail caps installed today and I have to wrap up the bed liner install with the tailgate cover some time next week. So I think the business end of the truck is getting close to being protected and ready for the eco related mods.

The factory air dam arrived and it is about 3 1/4 inches tall and mounts to a lip that is like 1/2" tall on the bottom of the bumper. The ground clearance with the bumper with no air dam is about 12". According to GM specs the truck has 7.9" of ground clearance. So I need to get the coverage from the air dam of at least 4.3". So I am going to round up and shoot to have at least 5" of coverage from the air dam plus the extension that I will add to the OEM air dam. That would give me about 7" of ground clearance and might be a decent compromise between economy and the ability to still work with the truck off road on my property. I will go back out and do some more measurements to ensure that I am going to be covering all the low hanging parts the best I can with that much coverage of about 5" or possibly 5.5". I will have to double check the measurements.

So my OEM air dam is here, my landscape edging is here, and my stainless bolts, washers, and nylocks are all waiting for me to get some time now. I need to get some more clean highway runs and get a better baseline of economy with the truck with no eco mods. First thing I will install that is eco related is the tonneau cover. I may go ahead next week and install the cover and just roll it up to do the runs and try to do an A-B-A run that way. We will just have to play it by ear and see how the schedule goes. :-)

[Longsnowsm]

Last night I cleaned the MAF, and the Throttle Body(TB), and replaced the plugs. MAF and TB looked pretty clean to me, but I scrubbed them up with some cleaner. The plugs however were a different story. A couple of the plugs showed some wear on the electrode so that I think was a needed fix. I didn't get an "Oh man, what a difference" feeling when done. I think it runs slightly smoother than before the cleaning and plugs replacement. Overall the process took 2 hours from beginning to end. Hopefully that will help things a little bit.

Next I have to button up the bed liner(still need to get the tail gate cover on it, and secure the sides with some screws) and get the tonneau cover on it. I will try to get that done this weekend. I had just tossed the bed liner in the back of the truck to get it out of the way of a garage project I have going on so I didn't get a chance to wrap up that install.

The cover is a roll up cover so I should be able to do some before and after comparison runs. I am curious to see how this truck behaves with the changes.

[Longsnowsm]

Finished buttoning up the drop in bed liner and I don't like one of the compromises that I had to make. My truck came with a factory tailgate cap/spoiler that extended the top of the tailgate width by about 1.5-2 inches so it was about 4 inches wide on the top and is there to help with economy. The drop in liner has a tailgate panel that extends over the top of the tailgate. They mention they know about the tailgate spoiler and made a dotted line across the tailgate panel where you can cut it off so that it wouldn't interfere with the tailgate spoiler. Looking at it I just couldn't see how that was going to be adequately secure nor did it appear it was going to work as well at protecting the tailgate. So I flipped a coin and removed the tailgate spoiler and just installed the bedliner panel.

I hope that removing that cap/spoiler isn't going to be a significant hit in my attempt to improve the trucks aero and fuel economy on the highway. I guess I will find out soon enough. I am not happy about that compromise. I will see if I can get some time to get the tonneau on the truck this weekend and see how it goes from there. If I can figure out how to post some pics I will post what this frankentruck looks like and what I am doing.

Update: Made my loop out of the city and back and saw 30.1 mpg up hill run with a tailwind, and 33.9 back downhill with a headwind keeping it at 55 mph. The wind factor is a variable that I haven't seen on the few previous runs, but the traffic was flowing and no hold ups due to traffic, just had to slow or stop for lights. So it is hard to tell if there is any real difference with the MAF/TB/plugs cleaning and change and the tailgate cap removal. Right now I would have to say it looks like the change is negligible, but will be able to tell more after a few more runs watching it.

[Longsnowsm]

Another out of city loop and back today. 28.4 mpg on the trip out(up hill) at 55 mph top speed, sadly I had 7 stops I was hit with flakey lights and just horrible timing. On the trip back the average picked up to 34.3 mpg at 55 mph and only had to stop at 1 light on the way back. So far the pattern in fuel economy on that loop has been fairly consistent other than when I choose bad time to go and get caught in traffic.

So I am a little concerned this truck isn't going to make my target 30mpg at 65 when I am averaging about that at 55mph. I am not sure mods are going to help me pick up the difference in FE. So it is time to just get on with the mods and lets see if I am going to hit my targets or not. Tonight I installed the tonneau cover on the truck. I have been waiting for some time to get that on the truck and it feels good to finally have it on. I will make some runs this week on my out of city loop and see if the FE improves.

Next weekend if time permits I will get my air dam mod done and see how that affects things the following week. I have to get some materials for the grill block soon. Right now based on what I have seen from other peoples mods it looks like the best case scenario I can expect between the cover, air dam, and grill block looks like I might make 29.5 mpg best case at 65mph. Not quite what I was hoping for so I will just have to be patient and see what happens and then decide the next steps once I get there.

[Longsnowsm]

Well I decided to just go ahead and try to extend the factory OEM air dam so that it would extend low enough to provide some cover for the low hanging bits on the truck. I don't understand GM at all on this air dam. Why would you add an air dam that comes no where near low enough to provide coverage under the truck? It is a 3.25 inch high dam that only about 2.75 inches extend below where the stock bump lip hangs down. GM states the ground clearance is 7.9 inches. I show about 12 inches to the bottom of the front bumper. So the factory air dam comes no where near covering the low hanging parts.

So I extended the factory air dam by about 3 inches. Working with the lawn edging is no fun and it didn't want to conform to the factory air dam without puckering up. So I tried to address this by using bolts and nuts every couple of inches with a washer. That helped a lot with the puckering, but now the bolts look horrible. So I slapped some gorrilla tape over it and that looks just as bad. So I give up, it just will look bad until I can think of better solution. All those bolts and washers were MEGA overkill, but I knew that double sided tape wasn't going to cut it. So I will have to give this some thought if I decide to revamp this thing.

So I went ahead and mounted the dam up and I have about 7.5 inches of ground clearance. So I think that should cover the low hanging parts and help somewhat with the FE. We will see. Hopefully I will get some time tomorrow to see how the combo of the tonneau cover and the air dam affect my FE.

[Longsnowsm]

Ok, my out of city loop/segment today was my first with the air dam and the tonneau cover. The truck cuts through the air much easier. Much easier to accel and hold speed. Looks like about 1.5 with those two mods together. Trip out 29.4 mpg, trip back average climbed to 34.9 mpg. Of course lots of variables with lights, traffic etc as usual, you never know what your going to get. This was once again at 55 mph on the open stretches of the road.

So now I need to get some ABS plastic ordered for the grill block and see where that takes this. Let me see if I can get some pics taken and posted here so you guys can see what has been done so far.

Interesting to watch the tonneau in the wind and where I see the air pressure pushing down on the cover. Makes me wish for a cab spoiler to move that air further back and provide less turbulance.

I am posting pics below from Google Photo's, but they are not showing up:






Let's try it below by URL link:
https://goo.gl/photos/aajygtsdBRskQwmVA
https://goo.gl/photos/PxAgzACiHXXB7TPx7
https://goo.gl/photos/8z759aBbZ64ZsA2V8
https://goo.gl/photos/PsSzGJXQNBkeMDmA9
https://goo.gl/photos/E4DDmpsWJNZGm2YD9

[Longsnowsm]

Ok, I posted pics to Google photos and copied the URL for those into this post, but I don't see them showing up. Not sure what I did wrong... :-(

[Longsnowsm]

Today was probably as close as I am going to get to a perfect fuel economy run on the loop I drive to test my mods. I had to stop at a grand total of 1 light the entire trip out and back. I did have to slow down to time the lights and only had to "almost" stop at one light. So that is as perfect as it gets I think for this loop I am testing on. The results:

Trip out: 32.2 mpg
Trip back: 38.2 mpg
Speed on highway segments: 55 mph

That is the best fuel economy I have gotten and not likely that I will match it again given how hard it is to make the trip without traffic and the lights hanging you up.

My ABS for the grill block finally arrived. I will try to get that on the truck soon so I can do a few more tests before my next road trip in the truck in October where I will see how close I was able to get to my stated goal of 30 mpg at 65 mph on that trip. That will be about 2000 miles round trip so that will be the real objective here with this truck and one of the reasons I downsized to a smaller truck like this.

[JRMichler]

When you look at your mileage, make note of elevation change, temperature, wind strength, and wind direction.

I find that an elevation change of 800 feet in 72 miles makes a difference of 4 to 5 MPG depending whether I'm going uphill or downhill. The seasonal changes in MPG in my gas log are almost all temperature because wind mostly averages out, although today's fill was unusually good because I had almost all tailwinds.