new guy, nissan hardbody

[dothadance]

long time lurker, fist time poster. my name's Connor and i was first introduced to hypermiling by user Jakins and his honda civic. my choice of cars hasn't been influenced by him but the modifications sure have, lmao. i own two vehicles, one of which runs; a 1989 bmw e30 that i'm swapping a 4.4l v8 from a 95 540i, and my "ECOMONSTER" a 95 nissan d21. Originally i wanted to buy an old vw rabbit pickup, partially because i'm an old german car freak, but mostly because the high mileage they got. and after a few slipped through my fingers i gave up the search deeming it unreasonable.
A few months go buy and i get introduced to the nissan hardbody mini truck world. i was hooked, but not for the reason everyone else likes them. An invincible 90's truck that has better gas mileage and a higher tow capacity than other comparable trucks? It had to be mine. With some time and some craigslist kung fu the dream had commenced.

(will add pictures once post count is high enough)

[dothadance]

some would call me crazy for choosing a truck to hypermile, but i feel there are few vehicles better, especially for what i'm wanting to do. i'm not looking for 100+ mpg and spend $9 dollars on modifications, i just want to see how far i can take it, regardless of if i make back my investment of mods in gas savings.

[oldtamiyaphile]

Well actually it makes more sense to hypermile something with bad economy than something that's rated 50mpg plus. Going from 20 to 40 mpg saves a lot more than going from 50 to 100. The first round of mods should see my truck go from 13mpg to 18, a saving roughly equivalent to getting the Prius up to 80mpg

[dothadance]

Originally Posted by oldtamiyaphile

Well actually it makes more sense to hypermile something with bad economy than something that's rated 50mpg plus. Going from 20 to 40 mpg saves a lot more than going from 50 to 100. The first round of mods should see my truck go from 13mpg to 18, a saving roughly equivalent to getting the Prius up to 80mpg

Lol. Never thought about it like that. Seems the reaction I get from everyone is along the lines of "why don't you just get (enter hybrid of choice)?". But i suppose this forum thinks a little differently from the masses.
The few cheap mods I've done and my driving style I'm averaging over 33 mpg. (Low estimate due to my odometer being broken). My truck is running rich from some awfully placed exhaust leaks, so once I get those sorted out I'm hoping for upper 30s.

My target is 45 mpg. Shouldn't be too hard

[elhigh]

Awesome. Welcome to the club.

I dunno about 45, but I'm pretty sure you can crack 40. I came within a hair's breadth of it once, hope to do it again ere long.

Yeah, those modest little pickups, from when "small truck" still meant "small." I don't know what the heck it means now, but it sure ain't "small." You can hypermile the heck out of those things and they really deliver when you start softpedaling them.

+1 on the "why don't you just buy x" argument. That drives me nuts. The name of the site is EcoMODDER, not EcoSHOPPER. We're trying to make the best of what's in the driveway, not on the dealer lot.

What have you got under the hood, the KA24? I hope you like it, because you're probably stuck with it. You'll die before it does, unless something amazing happens: Second Coming, meteor impact, etc. The KA24 is right up there with the Toyota 22r and the small block Chevy.

[dothadance]

Originally Posted by elhigh

Awesome. Welcome to the club.

I dunno about 45, but I'm pretty sure you can crack 40. I came within a hair's breadth of it once, hope to do it again ere long.

Yeah, those modest little pickups, from when "small truck" still meant "small." I don't know what the heck it means now, but it sure ain't "small." You can hypermile the heck out of those things and they really deliver when you start softpedaling them.

+1 on the "why don't you just buy x" argument. That drives me nuts. The name of the site is EcoMODDER, not EcoSHOPPER. We're trying to make the best of what's in the driveway, not on the dealer lot.

What have you got under the hood, the KA24? I hope you like it, because you're probably stuck with it. You'll die before it does, unless something amazing happens: Second Coming, meteor impact, etc. The KA24 is right up there with the Toyota 22r and the small block Chevy.

lmao, i crack up every time i park next to any modern truck. looks like a "honey i shrank the truck" movie. Yeah it's the single cam KA, and it gets the job done. When i bought the truck it was smoking pretty profusely. A quick compression check showed perfect compression across the board. changed the valve seals a week later and i haven't burnt a single drop of oil since!

[dothadance]

officially can post pictures wooh!
here she is about 10 minutes after i bought her


and heres my CAD mockup of future mods...
lol

[elhigh]

Nice. Tape stripes FTW!

Take a good, beltline-level shot of your truck, from right smack at the trailing edge of the door, from a modest distance, 50 feet or so. You want some distance to eliminate parallax error (is that the right term?). Then you can blow up that image and drop the aero template on top of it (find it in the sticky in the Aerodynamics section), scale the template so it's the same height as the image of your truck.

Then you line up the highest point of the template with the farthest-aft high point of your truck's cab. The template line from that point should give you a good line to follow with your aero cap, if you really want to max out its performance.

To get the fullest benefit of an aero cap, you want to take it just as far aft as you can. One guy even built an extension box on his truck and the cap then displaced his tailgate - I can't remember his name right now. It looked pretty sharp.

But that's the expensive, difficult way. If you're a talented fabricator in your medium of choice, it's not as difficult or as expensive as it is for the rest of us mortals. But you can get a lot of the results with a well done straight cap. Just keep its straight line as close to filling out the overall line of the template as possible and you should be good.