High MPG work truck

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by Joggernot

I lived in southern NM for 15 years. I know what you went through. Every vehicle ran hot and the air-cooled motorcycle ran very hot. I never saw a semi with the radiator covers closed during the summer. Had to have all the cooling available. Air Dams were popular in Carlsbad for the Honda and small car people.

Joggernot

I can see that. I was driving the kia rio over white sands mountian and it started to heat up. I turned the A/C off and it almost went back down to the usual needle sitting point.
I found out later that the kia had an air dam and that it was torn off at some point before I bought it.

[oil pan 4]

The grill shutters are installed.
For now I don't plan on including a way to close them, unless I happen to have a pull cable in my pull cable collection long enough to reach from the drivers seat to the grill shutters.
At least for now I will just hold them open with gravity and a spring.
I would like to control them with an air cylinder.

[oil pan 4]

This is what it will look like, with an invisable radiator.

[Diesel_Dave]

Looks nice!

[ECONORAM]

I agree. Nice work, stealth radiator and all... I seem to remember someone mentioning trying to control shutters like this with Arduino?

[oil pan 4]

Originally Posted by ECONORAM

I agree. Nice work, stealth radiator and all... I seem to remember someone mentioning trying to control shutters like this with Arduino?

I think I am going to go old school and use a shutter stat.

[oil pan 4]

I forgot to add that I installed 3/4 ton springs off a junk yard C20 pickup last month. The Springs were clearly not as old as the truck they came out of.

I busted out my miller625 plasma cutter and got it dirty cutting out those old half ton springs, after closer inspection they were beyond dead.

I replaced the rear shocks with bilsteins in 2006 because the ride provided by the rear end was pretty harsh, replacing the shocks didn't help much.
But now that I swapped out the springs it made all the difference in the world.
The rear sits about 2 or 3 inches higher now, the trailer hitch was almost dragging on the ground when I would load up the suburban.
Now the rear end rides nice and smooth and I don't feel every bump in the road.
Who would have figured 3/4 ton springs would provide a smoother ride than half ton springs?

I think those springs were killed by the last person that owned my suburban, they had it setup (cheaply) for some heavy towing duty.

These used springs were $60, new half ton springs from rockauto were going to be several hundred dollars. And because they were so long (54'') and heavy (>70lb each) they would have been freight shipped and I don't even know how much more that would have cost.

[justme1969]

[QUOTE=oil pan 4;378547]I finely got around to measuring how much power it takes to turn a P/S pump.
It looks like if you can keep the P/S turning at 850rpms it takes hardly any power to turn, around 150 to 200 watts.
But when you bring it up to a more normal cruse speed say about 2,000 rpms power draw goes up quite a bit. It took a little over 500 watts to keep it turning at that speed.
For my suburban 500w gets about a half MPG.
I'm going with a clutched setup.

I seen where you posted on a diff thread about this. was this just free circulating into a bucket or beltless on vehicle test?

[oil pan 4]

This test was done when I removed the radiator and had lots of room to stick a drill on there.
Other test equipment used was a kill-a-watt meter for measuing power consumption, a varrac for fine tuning drill speed and an optical tachometer so I know what RPMs the drill was turning. There was a warm up peroid for the drill and P/S pump and mutiple no-load drill rechecks.

Why would anyone remove the pump and do the test?
There would be no point, it would take a lot more work and the test results wouldn't produce any kind of useable result.

Further back in that post I discribe how I would test it and calculated the max power draw off the engine to be some where around 2 to 2.5hp.

If I spun the pump up to 3000 or more RPMs it could very well come to a point where it reaches 2hp.

[ECONORAM]

On the grill block subject, I've tested it with my truck and I actually lose a couple percent mpg with about 80% covered. Can't use it down here in the summer anyway--I think my electric fan wouldn't stop running.
Thanks for the ps pump testing. Interesting results.
Curious that 3/4 ton springs ride better. Wouldn't have guessed. Usually the shocks make the difference on the lighter end of the vehicle...