How To Free Up Power?

TruckYou · July 7, 2009

Well i know their are a few tricks you can do to free up some extra power and make the motor more efficient such as: Port and polishing throttle body, polishing the heads, polishing the rods, re-flashing the computer, better gaskets.. what are some other tricks y'all know of to free up a little power in the engine without spending more than $50 on any single item.. i'm not trying to make a runner out of my 4.8l just free up a little extra power that it could easily produce

edit: not having the heads sent off for port and polish, just doing a polish job which i am more than capable of doing. I've done polish jobs on ls1 heads, a b16 civic head, my old 4-wheeler.. it's not hard if you have the right equipment and know what your doing.

Draenor · July 7, 2009

For no more than $50. .....Nothing....

Plus porting and polishing the heads will cost ya' more than $50.

c_m_chance · July 16, 2009

You can change out the stock fan. I mean electric fan is definitely the way to go, but they are pretty pricey. But they sell after market fans that you can replace the stock steel one with. They make them in plastic and some are in aluminum. I recommend the aluminum ones because the plastic ones tend to flatten out at high RPMs and don't actually blow air towards your engine. The aluminum ones stiffer and hold their shape and are still lighter than the stock fan blade. I'm not sure what the GM ones cost, but my last truck was a Dodge Ram and the ones that fit it were from like $30 to $60 on average, but some got up around $100 if I remember correctly. This can free up 2, 3 maybe 4 horses I suppose. Nothing noticeable, but every little bit helps I guess, right?

Changing out your lubricants to all synthetic is good for a few horses as well. Now yes, synthetic lubricant isn't cheap. But say you figure you pay $4 for a regular quart of oil and $9 for a synthetic quart of oil. Thats $5 dollars per quart difference and say you buy 6 quarts, thats only a $30 difference. With this in mind, your gonna have to change your oil eventually anyway. So when its time to change it next, just ad an extra $30 bucks to it and get a really nice synthetic oil to run in your truck. As far as tranny and differential, you don't have to change these oils very often. So i would just change those to synthetic whenever you have some extra cash that you wanna invest on your truck. Synthetic oil is definitely worth it too! Improve performance, engine life, length of oil changes, you just can't go wrong with it.

Other than that, I can't think of anything else that would be under $50. You can do some home brew mods to your intake to increase air flow, but it really doesn't affect power too much with the computers they have in these trucks nowadays. But, once again, every little bit helps right? lol