I'm back from my trip into the Berkshires and Adirondack mountains, and I got some good insight into my current 4.10 gears and supercharger setup.
My mileage with the 4.10 gears and supercharger was 15.3 mpg on the trip, and that compares to 17.1 mpg on a previous trip with 3.42 gears and the supercharger. BUT, the 2 trips were on different roads with different elevation maps, so my mpg findings may be a bit distorted. The first trip was on predominantly on reasonably level roads, and the most recent trip was on a significantly larger percentage of miles in the mountains. My feeling is that if both tests were on the SAME road, the difference in mpg between the 2 gear ratios would be substantially smaller.
Here is the most interesting insight that I got. With the 3.42 gears traveling through the mountains at 60-75 mph, I would get gear downshifts on the most upward inclined portions on the mountain roads. I'm not sure what the supercharger was doing, as I did not have a boost gauge at the time. With the 4.10 gears, I very rarely got a downshift on the most upward inclined portions on the mountain roads. What I did see, though, was that I got between 1.0 and 2.5 lbs. of boost from the supercharger, when going on the most upward inclined portions on the mountain roads, but still remaining in 6th gear. As such, my supercharger got much less work than I had anticipated on this trip. I will note that I used my cruise control on most of the trip.
On the trip home, it was in the 90's temperature-wise, and for the first time, I saw coolant temperatures go above 210 degrees, perhaps as high at 225 degrees on the most upward inclined portions on the mountain roads. If I turned off the AC, the coolant temperature would retreat back to 210 degrees. My question to the Forum Members is, can I upgrade my cooling fans to the 700 watt cooling fans as a direct plug and play upgrade? And, do I need a different wiring harness and connectors to achieve this upgrade?
