When I met my wife, I had a '70 Gold Duster with a rebuilt /6. After the marriage, I did a bunch of upgrades to the car. I'm a fuel economy guy, have been since 1991 when I started tinkering with it. I got that sucker to a best of 92 MPG on a custom fuel delivery system that only I could drive -- and it was a bi+ch to drive, even for me. I did 2 other custom "Nay Boxes" that gave me around 60 MPG, but again problematic as all get-out. I settled on a product called the Power Plate that gave me consistent 40+ MPG normal driving.
This was a test bed of sorts for much of my early research. Over the years I played with many other vehicles -- most of which I didn't own -- in my quest for better performance and fuel efficiency. I did some minimal head porting experiments with my '73 Road Runner when I swapped the 400 for a mild 440 I built.
I'm still chasing performance while tied to improved fuel efficiency. My current work horse is
technically a Mopar -- a 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee.
Bought it out of Missouri for $800. I then did a bunch of what anyone would do with a 30 year old vehicle; replaced much of the suspension, refurbished the interior using a parts vehicle, cleaned the sucker (green stuff growing on it from sitting), etc. Here is where the good stuff starts. I had built a 4.6 stroker that uses a 4.0 block and AMC 258 crank. I used a 2004 TUPY head (which I did massive porting on), a Comp Cams "Rock Crawler" cam, and ended up with a 10.2:1 CR beast. My engine build can be found
here.
I created the
MPGenie.com web site which outlines numerous things that can be done to a vehicle to improve performance & fuel efficiency. I started adding MPGenie things one after another. With the exception of replacing the factory distributor with GM LS individual coils, everything I've done to it is part of the MPGenie Program. (Of course going from a distributor with single coil to 6 individual coils required a stand-alone ECU. I'm using the rusEFI.com UAEFI.) I'm currently getting around 24 MPG (up from the stock 15.x), which is around a 60% increase. Power is WAY better than the stock 4.0. Oh, and it runs on the cheapest 87 octane fuel. My vehicle build thread is
here. (It has over 15k views and 218 replies.)
Does this count?