Chapter 4 - Aug 1, 2006
4/14/06
About a month after the swap I discovered a problem with using the overdrive: I’m losing gas mileage. With gas hovering around $3.00 a gallon this was a problem. Since I don’t currently have a tach in the car its hard to determine what RPM the car operates at on the freeway. It seems to me that the overdrive gear is too steep for the rear gear ratio of 3:36. I could drop to 3:55 or something lower. This would bring another problem: First gear is 3:75 and feels short now. It would be almost useless with a lower rear gear. So probably the most intelligent thing to do would be replacing the overdrive gear with a shallower gear. Kevin says it would be around $400-$600. This doesn’t include the cost of removing the tranny at Earl’s. As I was telling Zeke, one of the Inliner members on the forum, I wished I had just swapped in a 4 speed Saginaw. It would have been a hell of a lot cheaper.
For my birthday in February, my wife gave me some money to put towards new tires on the car. I scored some 14x6 rally rims, trim rings and derby caps on Ebay last summer and could now use them. Because of the offset on the rims I felt the derby caps would stick out like a sore thumb. I put an ad on craigslist and actually traded the derbies for a set of the aftermarket flat caps I wanted. How cool is that?
About a month after the swap I discovered a problem with using the overdrive: I’m losing gas mileage. With gas hovering around $3.00 a gallon this was a problem. Since I don’t currently have a tach in the car its hard to determine what RPM the car operates at on the freeway. It seems to me that the overdrive gear is too steep for the rear gear ratio of 3:36. I could drop to 3:55 or something lower. This would bring another problem: First gear is 3:75 and feels short now. It would be almost useless with a lower rear gear. So probably the most intelligent thing to do would be replacing the overdrive gear with a shallower gear. Kevin says it would be around $400-$600. This doesn’t include the cost of removing the tranny at Earl’s. As I was telling Zeke, one of the Inliner members on the forum, I wished I had just swapped in a 4 speed Saginaw. It would have been a hell of a lot cheaper.
For my birthday in February, my wife gave me some money to put towards new tires on the car. I scored some 14x6 rally rims, trim rings and derby caps on Ebay last summer and could now use them. Because of the offset on the rims I felt the derby caps would stick out like a sore thumb. I put an ad on craigslist and actually traded the derbies for a set of the aftermarket flat caps I wanted. How cool is that?
Album information
- Category
- Photo Journal
- Album owner
- strummin67
- Date created
- Item count
- 2
- View count
- 68
- Comment count
- 0
- Rating
- 0.00 star(s) 0 ratings