Truck Tweaks Since Last Post

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It’s been a while since I’ve last posted, and we’re out enjoying a stay at a RV park, so with the welcome downtime, I decided to post an update. I’ve made several small adjustments to the truck, and a few major ones, since last posting.

Among those changes were tuning the engine and transmission, and changing the fuel pump from a CP4 to a CP3 unit, which is much more reliable and doesn’t grenade when it fails, taking out the entire fuel system. There is a lot of information to cover about those upgrades, so I’ll save them for another post one of these days. In summary, though, I swap out tunes depending on what I am using the truck for, and have about 400rwhp for towing with some towing-specific parameters (“heavy tow”) and a 550rwhp tune I drive daily with – the tunes burn clean, with no black smoke (maybe a tiny bit for a fraction of a second at wide open throttle) and are a great improvement over stock. Those changes took about twenty hours to complete, mostly due to the complexity of the fuel pump swap. The mods are listed over on the Our Rig page, in the Engine & Performance section.

The truck is filthy now, as we’re camping and tracking mud in and out of the truck, and the dogs have shed all over it, but I did purchase new floor mats. I’ve had WeatherTech liners in the past, which are considered the best of the best, but wasn’t real happy with them and wasn’t sure I wanted them for this truck. I looked at the Husky liners but wasn’t terribly impressed with them either. I ended up buying the Aries Styleguard mats, which are amazing. Here is the driver’s seat floor mat:

The driver’s mat is the only one I wasn’t happy with as they shipped. The mats are all designed for specific make/model vehicles, but the fitment of the grommets that hold them wasn’t right. They didn’t grab onto the factory pieces and floated loosely in the floorboard. I ended up swapping the OEM grommets from the factory mats onto these, which took just a couple minutes to do but yields much better results. These don’t come up as far as the WeatherTech or Husky mats, but come up far enough, and have full coverage under the gas pedal as well as over the door jam, and have a very premium feel to them. The backing is almost like velcro, and seems to work better than the underside of the WT or the sharp plastic cleats on the Husky mats that tend to damage carpet over time.

Also, I moved the aux light and air bag switches out of the path of my legs, in case of an automobile accident. They fit really over the bin on the wall of the center console.

The new device under the grab handle is a Edge Insight CTS2, which is essentially a bunch of digital gauges to let you know where various parameters of your vehicle are sitting. It has some accessories you can add, such as an external EGT probe, which I opted for. I added the probe pre-turbo on the passenger side exhaust manifold, which required drilling and tapping.

You can see the back mat here, which is full coverage including under the seat. I added Du-Ha tool storage under the seat, which helps organize my mess and allows me to reclaim the floor space that was taken up by my Makita tool bags sitting in front of the seats.

With the seats down, I have fully functional back seating now and manageable storage.

For the outside of the truck, I decided to try adding some in-channel EGR visors. Driving with the windows down on this truck is a pretty loud and annoying experience, and I’ve never had them before, so I figured I’d give them a try. They really seem to work well, and look nice. They are the SlimLine series, and the install took less than ten minutes. I read that the OE visors they sell are rebadged EGR, and that played a role in my decision to purchase these over the WeatherTech ones.

Last, I lowered the front end of the truck approximately two inches to try and ease suspension wear and increase fuel mileage. I had to get an alignment afterwards, but aside from that, there is little to the process (just turn the torsion bolts). On this trip, we have averaged 9mpg with the trailer and 17.5mpg unloaded according to the DIC. My speedometer seems to be reading about 7% low, something I need to contact my tuner about, which means my mileage may be up to that much higher, assuming the DIC is close to accurate.

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