Grumpy Bears 2015 Silverado 2WD

[Grumpy Bear]

2 hours ago, Black02Silverado said:

Refresh my memory. You installed this for what reason?  It is a true piece of art that is for sure.  True craftsmanship and high quality work.

I'm siick of the every few months or weeks, sometimes days failure of the Jet/Summit series thermostats and Mishimoto is just to cold for day in day out street work. Truck would be down 10 days or more sometime waiting and fighting with suppliers over replacement or repair work. Crap parts from crap vendors at ridiculous prices. 

 

The GM 207 F factory unit is ignorantly hot and I wanted a colder unit. Stant has been my bread and butter go to for nearly 50 years. Maybe I've seen one failure in millions of miles. To use a Stant Superstat I either had to heavily modify a factory water pump to accept a Gen 1 SBC neck housing OR place the thermostat in the upper hose. A thousand times more reliable than either the GM factory part or any Asian stat on the market with a wide number of set points avialable and at about 30% the cost. I could have spun this up myself but.....Mark does such nice work. 

 

Reliability and efficiency are tied at the hip to heat management and in some misguided thinking GM has opted to thin fluids with temperature instead of chemistry to help company fuel averages. It's one way but in my estimation it's the wrong way. In the graph you can see the incremental step improvements I was making as I cooled, modified and changed out fluids....until....the stat failed...again tanking the last two tanks before I caught on to what was going on. The seal would seal overnight and act fine for about a half hour. I'd switch the Scan Gauge to some other thing I wanted to watch then BOOM the seal would pull away, jamb the valve partially open and run 150 - 155 F. Those modifications and test are further back in this tread. Intermittent in the beginning. 

 

First outing today 184-186 F water. 153-163 F transmission. 204 - 210 F engine oil. 82 - 87 F air temperature. 60% humidity. 55 - 60 mph. 12 - 15 mph wind on my 12 then on my 6 round trip. 30 mpg two way average to pull this last tank back to the lifetime average. Whew! Anyway now I can get back to my experiments. 

 

Detailed under the hood today. 

 

Edited July 13, 2018 by Grumpy Bear

[Black02Silverado]

8 hours ago, Grumpy Bear said:

I'm siick of the every few months or weeks, sometimes days failure of the Jet/Summit series thermostats and Mishimoto is just to cold for day in day out street work. Truck would be down 10 days or more sometime waiting and fighting with suppliers over replacement or repair work. Crap parts from crap vendors at ridiculous prices. 

 

The GM 207 F factory unit is ignorantly hot and I wanted a colder unit. Stant has been my bread and butter go to for nearly 50 years. Maybe I've seen one failure in millions of miles. To use a Stant Superstat I either had to heavily modify a factory water pump to accept a Gen 1 SBC neck housing OR place the thermostat in the upper hose. A thousand times more reliable than either the GM factory part or any Asian stat on the market with a wide number of set points avialable and at about 30% the cost. I could have spun this up myself but.....Mark does such nice work. 

 

Reliability and efficiency are tied at the hip to heat management and in some misguided thinking GM has opted to thin fluids with temperature instead of chemistry to help company fuel averages. It's one way but in my estimation it's the wrong way. In the graph you can see the incremental step improvements I was making as I cooled, modified and changed out fluids....until....the stat failed...again tanking the last two tanks before I caught on to what was going on. The seal would seal overnight and act fine for about a half hour. I'd switch the Scan Gauge to some other thing I wanted to watch then BOOM the seal would pull away, jamb the valve partially open and run 150 - 155 F. Those modifications and test are further back in this tread. Intermittent in the beginning. 

 

First outing today 184-186 F water. 153-163 F transmission. 204 - 210 F engine oil. 82 - 87 F air temperature. 60% humidity. 55 - 60 mph. 12 - 15 mph wind on my 12 then on my 6 round trip. 30 mpg two way average to pull this last tank back to the lifetime average. Whew! Anyway now I can get back to my experiments. 

 

Detailed under the hood today. 

 

Now I understand.  Thanks for the info. 

[Grumpy Bear]

Honey I'm home! 387 mile trip that averaged 30.01 mpg. That is six of the last eight tanks at 30+. Previous to this run Pepper has had five tanks over her lifetime that high. Note the recovery in todays updated graph. Verification that viscosity has a HUGE influence on mileage in motors with AFM. Which by the way is on almost constantly these days without a Range or Marathon device. Shuts of on hills over 3%. Head winds over 20 mph or when the timer times out. Couldn't be more on. 

 

55 mph on a Federal Highway whose speed limit is...55 mph. East west round trip that started with a 15-20 mph wind off my 10. A two hour cool down during the visit and lunch during which time the wind shifted with a storm putting me into a 15-20 wind off my 2. Air temperature started at 72 and two hours in over 90 peaking 96 F. Ran the AC about half the time. Some minor idle time for one lane road construction.

 

So at speed, into an all day unfavorable cross wind with the air on and STILL 30 mpg. Remember I running at 28-30 psi in the tires.  These are NOT DIC numbers. This is hand calculated numbers with a corrected speedometer. 

 

I use to get an occasional tank that for maybe half of them were tank fill variations which went away with the level. The variations that is. What use to come with some difficulty and randomly sometimes under the speed limit is now just about turn key at local speed limits. With a tail wind she will tag some numbers I won't even mention cause you would call me a liar. 

 

 

                                                                                                        

 

Two in a row. I am not hating this. 

 

Edited July 14, 2018 by Grumpy Bear
Update Chart

[Grumpy Bear]

It isn’t very often things just go my way. Over a thousand miles (as of today) on the new thermostat arrangement and solid as a rock. The 180 F unit seems about right for my particular driving habits and it’s yielding the type of results I expected it might if I could get it to work long enough to collect the data. I wasn’t unhappy with the 170 trigger point but this is more to my liking. Today on roughly 300 miles and on a mid 80F day I saw a pretty steady 184 F water temp. Mid 150’s for transmission although it will creep up near 180 F in town and takes a good long while on the open road to get back near 160F.  Oil temperatures at my chosen speeds run 199 to 210 F.  

 

The factory housing is now empty of its contents although I refrained from cutting off the retaining ears just in case I might want to move the IPSCO unit to a different truck. No, I have no plan to trade Pepper but it’s when I don’t have a plan, one is made for me. Deer, hail, you know.

 

There is a bleed hose on that housing that returns to the surge tank that has about an 0.50” orifice. Good thing I looked too or I would have drilled to large a hole in the Stant. 5/64” is what I settled on for a first run at it and it looks like a winner although I will not be fully satisfied until I see it work this winter. I will hit mid 190’s to open on a restart which is a bit high but let’s look at it for a while.

 

I have several irons in the fire at the moment.:

 

1.) Getting that PML alloy trans pan installed for one. I’ve heard it helps quicken heat spike recovery times. This will be an 8 quart drop and fill with a new WIX filter. Depending on that result I’m still looking at:

 

2.) an auxiliary trans cooler and a:

 

3.) 160 F trans thermostat after the radiator cooler and in front of the aux. unit to kill the spikes and add some hot day capacity.

 

4.) Perhaps a inline filter as well.

 

I am loving these 600# King springs and so having put on about 3K since the install time to:

 

5.) Check and adjust the alignment once more. A little more tweak to the castor is in order. Less.

 

I’ve decided perhaps about:

 

6.) 50 psi less N2 in the back side, remove two leaves and a .180” left side shim is about all the rear tweak I might want. That happens before the alignment.

 

7.) Needs a full on detail. I’ve done the box and under the hood over the last few days and a quick and dirty interior clean up. Paint needs some correction.

 

8.) More rust proofing. Line-X the bumpers. Cosmoline the front fender interiors behind the sound deadening, cab corners and rocker panels along with the rear wheel arches. I will be using a different Line-X shop than the box. I paid for a rust proof they never did.

 

9.) And I still want to re-gear this thing and add a Torsen diff. 

[Grumpy Bear]

5,574 miles / 189 gallons = 29.56 MPG. Pretty sure I can call this a trend. Including the 714 miles of thermostat failure. Entire summer to date has averaged 29.82 mpg up from last summers 27.24 mpg average. Up 8.7%. This amount the data definable result of lower vis Redline allowed by better heat management. 

 

Trans pan is the next project as soon as I can get in touch with my head wrench. Vacation season. Jury Duty. Interruptions of my plans. 

 

 

[KARNUT]

5,574 miles / 189 gallons = 29.56 MPG. Pretty sure I can call this a trend. Including the 714 miles of thermostat failure. Entire summer to date has averaged 29.82 mpg up from last summers 27.24 mpg average. Up 8.7%. This amount the data definable result of lower vis Redline allowed by better heat management. 
 
Trans pan is the next project as soon as I can get in touch with my head wrench. Vacation season. Jury Duty. Interruptions of my plans. 
 
 

I know it’s not your goal, I’d love to see 1/4 mile times with a re gear. In the not to distance past my big three was performance, comfort, mileage. Now no.1 is number 3, but it’s still there.


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[Grumpy Bear]

13 hours ago, KARNUT said:

I know it’s not your goal, I’d love to see 1/4 mile times with a re gear. In the not to distance past my big three was performance, comfort, mileage. Now no.1 is number 3, but it’s still there.


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Oh it's crossed my mind. I have four tracks within two hours in three directions. Union Grove, Byron, Cordova and Chicagoland Speedway US 66. A few more within 4 hours. Indy and Humboldt Iowa, Eddyville Iowa. I would have to address the transmission tune for that me thinks. Sound right? 

 

Do you think people understand that the last bump in mileage came from the 0 in the 0W20 vs the 5W20? 

Edited July 19, 2018 by Grumpy Bear

[KARNUT]

Oh it's crossed my mind. I have four tracks within two hours in three directions. Union Grove, Byron, Cordova and Chicagoland Speedway US 66. A few more within 4 hours. Indy and Humboldt Iowa, Eddyville Iowa. I would have to address the transmission tune for that me thinks. Sound right? 
 
Do you think people understand that the last bump in mileage came from the 0 in the 0W20 vs the 5W20? 

I would think so, the heat thing has me thinking. Bach in the day the big blocks seemed to hate heat we ran 165 stats. My 92 has a colder stat with the blower. I thought today’s engines had hotter stats for emissions and fuel mileage. You seem to be proving otherwise.


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[Grumpy Bear]

2 hours ago, KARNUT said:

I would think so, the heat thing has me thinking. Bach in the day the big blocks seemed to hate heat we ran 165 stats. My 92 has a colder stat with the blower. I thought today’s engines had hotter stats for emissions and fuel mileage. You seem to be proving otherwise.
 

Sir I made my living doing just that. I wore allot of hats in the field that chose me but the one worn the best was just being a good old fashion troubleshooter. I fixed stuff companies didn't even know was broke and a few things that were no one else seemed to be able to get a figure on. God gives everyone some gift, right?  Processes. Equipment. SOP's. Methods. It's all fair game. 

 

Know why Harley Davidson refuses to use 10W40? The buyers perception that 40 is for Asian bikes but 'real bikes' use 50 or even 60 weight. I'm not tied to any such 'man card' thinking so I get to reap the benefit of not following a popular misguided thought. Just picking the low hanging fruit. Using my education to make adjustments that allow more effectives means, methods and/or products to be used. 

 

But sometimes an idea persist due to conflicting goals. OEM's want good economy sure but they also want some other things too. Longevity. Emissions. Buyer perception. Mostly they want to remain in control of the product no matter whose name is on the title. They get to decide how long it last and how well it serves it's host with the end game in mind of keeping the next product cycle going. Give that some thought! Some of those goals align with mine. Some are diametrically opposed.

 

There is also this Stan; and you actually know this, in fact, I'm likely preaching to the choir; the end user has the most impact on what and how a product performs. Royal Enfield Motorcycles are a great example. The Bullet 500 was a bike unchanged over 50 years in production. In point of fact it digressed when production moved to India from England. Cheaper raw materials and a failing quality control system. If you understood this you didn't try to ride it like it was a Honda and got great results. But most buyers tend to want to treat a thing as they believe it 'should be' instead of 'what it is' and never even explore 'what it could be'. I'm the guy in that last group. 

 

A guys MAN CARD can only be revoked with the permission he gives by submission to fear, ignorance and stupidity. Well...and telling God to leave the buss can get your ticket punched. He's the guy that made the laws of the Universe and somehow when those laws become troublesome to someone they tend to reject those laws and NEVER does that favor them. Fuel economy is just one on a long list of subjects where people ignore his laws to their own demise.

 

People will argue till they drop over 'the why of a thing' or a 'how' but the results are harder to call out on, right?  

 

[KARNUT]

Sir I made my living doing just that. I wore allot of hats in the field that chose me but the one worn the best was just being a good old fashion troubleshooter. I fixed stuff companies didn't even know was broke and a few things that were no one else seemed to be able to get a figure on. God gives everyone some gift, right?  Processes. Equipment. SOP's. Methods. It's all fair game. 
 
Know why Harley Davidson refuses to use 10W40? The buyers perception that 40 is for Asian bikes but 'real bikes' use 50 or even 60 weight. I'm not tied to any such 'man card' thinking so I get to reap the benefit of not following a popular misguided thought. Just picking the low hanging fruit. Using my education to make adjustments that allow more effectives means, methods and/or products to be used. 
 
But sometimes an idea persist due to conflicting goals. OEM's want good economy sure but they also want some other things too. Longevity. Emissions. Buyer perception. Mostly they want to remain in control of the product no matter whose name is on the title. They get to decide how long it last and how well it serves it's host with the end game in mind of keeping the next product cycle going. Give that some thought! Some of those goals align with mine. Some are diametrically opposed.
 
There is also this Stan; and you actually know this, in fact, I'm likely preaching to the choir; the end user has the most impact on what and how a product performs. Royal Enfield Motorcycles are a great example. The Bullet 500 was a bike unchanged over 50 years in production. In point of fact it digressed when production moved to India from England. Cheaper raw materials and a failing quality control system. If you understood this you didn't try to ride it like it was a Honda and got great results. But most buyers tend to want to treat a thing as they believe it 'should be' instead of 'what it is' and never even explore 'what it could be'. I'm the guy in that last group. 
 
A guys MAN CARD can only be revoked with the permission he gives by submission to fear, ignorance and stupidity. Well...and telling God to leave the buss can get your ticket punched. He's the guy that made the laws of the Universe and somehow when those laws become troublesome to someone they tend to reject those laws and NEVER does that favor them. Fuel economy is just one on a long list of subjects where people ignore his laws to their own demise.
 
People will argue till they drop over 'the why of a thing' or a 'how' but the results are harder to call out on, right?  
 

I don’t doubt most of your conclusions. I follow the same path. The only reason I pause during the warranty period sometimes is to make sure there’s no defect. Don’t want to give an excuse to deny an obvious defect.


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[mookdoc6]

So let me get this straight?  I have a 4dr Crew Cab with 3.42 's and loaded down with 300LB topper, gear, luggage, 4 passengers...in 100f+ weather mind you?  I have original "T-Stat" you know the one stupid GM does not know anything about?  I netted 24.1 MPG's at 60-65 mph for 500+ miles.

 

Wow.....all that nonsense and your Cooler for Trans and Engine are 10f cooler than mine...LOL  This is too much for me....................................

[wlezel]

9 minutes ago, mookdoc6 said:

So let me get this straight?  I have a 4dr Crew Cab with 3.42 's and loaded down with 300LB topper, gear, luggage, 4 passengers...in 100f+ weather mind you?  I have original "T-Stat" you know the one stupid GM does not know anything about?  I netted 24.1 MPG's at 60-65 mph for 500+ miles.

 

Wow.....all that nonsense and your Cooler for Trans and Engine are 10f cooler than mine...LOL  This is too much for me....................................

@mookdoc6 I sent you a PM, please read when you get a moment. Thanks bud!

Edited July 19, 2018 by wlezel

[Grumpy Bear]

1 hour ago, mookdoc6 said:

So let me get this straight?  I have a 4dr Crew Cab with 3.42 's and loaded down with 300LB topper, gear, luggage, 4 passengers...in 100f+ weather mind you?  I have original "T-Stat" you know the one stupid GM does not know anything about?  I netted 24.1 MPG's at 60-65 mph for 500+ miles.

 

Wow.....all that nonsense and your Cooler for Trans and Engine are 10f cooler than mine...LOL  This is too much for me.................................…

All "that nonsense" has netted Pepper a 20% gain in fuel efficiency and it will double her life baring a French Kiss with a deer. This response of  yours is a perfect example of the sort of thing I totally disregard to achieve my goals. Stopped listening to things like this and 'double dog dare you' when I was about five. Thanks for the example. You have a nice day. 

 

2 hours ago, KARNUT said:

I don’t doubt most of your conclusions. I follow the same path. The only reason I pause during the warranty period sometimes is to make sure there’s no defect. Don’t want to give an excuse to deny an obvious defect.
 

Prudence is wise indeed.   

[mookdoc6]

This comical.........Wow.....watch me!  Look at me Daddy!  Now, Mook drives his stock GMC 2016 8 Cylinder at 55mph for 100 miles.....I bet I get 25MPG's no problem?  So folks?  What exactly is your point with a 4.3L 6cyl single cab with all these nonsensical modifications to achieve 30mpg's....forget the popcorn this is Peanuts stuff! 

[Grumpy Bear]

5 hours ago, mookdoc6 said:

This comical.........Wow.....watch me!  Look at me Daddy!  Now, Mook drives his stock GMC 2016 8 Cylinder at 55mph for 100 miles.....I bet I get 25MPG's no problem?  So folks?  What exactly is your point with a 4.3L 6cyl single cab with all these nonsensical modifications to achieve 30mpg's....forget the popcorn this is Peanuts stuff! 

This is a build thread ina forum dedicated to PERSONAL builds. This one is MY build thread.  

 

I've recorded where I started, what I've done,  the result. That's the point. Do you understand that? This is not about YOU or your truck. Don't you have a thread of your own?  

 

You want to compare something you THINK you MIGHT be able to do for a distance of 100 miles to what Pepper accomplished over 70,000 miles? I don't have to think about it, this thread is the record of what she's done for a thousand miles, five thousand miles, ten thousand miles or a life time. I could by you a truck like mine and you couldn't duplicate the result if I handed you a road map. Which I have and your laughing at me? I don't care about what you THINK YOU CAN DO. 

Edited July 19, 2018 by Grumpy Bear