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220 miles of driving in the rain and 50 miles with a 30mph headwind, dropped the mileage on this tank down to 63mpg. Got stopped by another curious town cop, this time in Greenwood. This reason given for stopping me was that he couldn't see my license plate easily. I'm starting to recognise the pattern. They pull me over for some trivial reason, check out my license and registration, and then when they hand back my documents, they ask me what all of the stuff on the car is for. No ticket, no warning, just curiousity, which is fine with me.
My car will be off the road for a few days to a week. The voltage regulator has gradually been getting flakier over the past few weeks, coming to a head these past two days. The voltage regulator is part of the alternator, so I have a new alternator on order. The existing alternator was a rebuilt unit that I installed 2 years ago, but obviously the rebuilding didn't extend to the voltage regulator board.
In the meanwhile, I 'll be hypermiling my farm truck, a 97 F150 V6 5 speed, 4x4, long bed. I ran the tires up to 50psi (front), 44psi (rear), and blocked off the upper and lower grill intakes (there is still a 1/2" wide gap where the top of the bumper meets the sheet metal). It used to coast just slightly worse than my stock Civic, but now it seems like a real slug compared to my aero Civic, with downhill terminal velocities 10-15 mph less than my Civic and coasting distances about 1/2 to 1/3 that of the Civic. I've gotten up to 26mpg out of it in local driving in the summer. It'll be interesting to see what it will do following the same driving regime I do with the Civic (except I can't coast anywhere near as many places enroute with it as I do the Civic).
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