I live around Dayton Ohio and was curious how gas prices where elsewhere. We recently say pump prices reaching $4.15 a gallon for diesel. I drive a 53 mile round trip to work everyday and have an hour and a half drive to my national guard unit in columbus and gas prices are burning holes in my pockets. I was interested to hear what other people were doing to deal with the gas prices !

 

Well, I am saving up some money to buy another vehicle and have been watching the ads on CL while the full sized Fords keep going down in price from people not buying them.

I hope to eventually snag a E-350 diesel and F-250/F-350 to build another 4x4 van cheap. I plan on taking advantage of the gas prices. I doubt I could afford a diesel 4x4 Excursion even at $5 a gallon.

Other then that, I try not to drive as much. Even at 21 mpg it adds up and I have seen my monthly costs skyrocket $300+ from the gas prices.

 

Ive seen some great trucks going for some very low prices because owners cant afford to fill them up and no one wants to pay a descent amount with gas prices so high. Similar to the housing prices, lots of houses on the market and very few buyers. But like you said sometimes it is good to take the oppurtunity while you can.

 

My girlfriend just bought a used Chevy Tracker to deal with rising fuel costs. She is an RN in home health and fuel costs for her 03 Nissan Xterra were taking a toll on her pocketbook. In fact, the Xterra gets worse fuel mileage than my F 150!

As of yesterday, regular gasoline was 3.16 a gallon. Took a shade over 15 bucks to fill my 5 gallon gas can for the mower!

As for myself, my truck will sit on really nice days and I will ride my V Star that can get up to 50mpg.

 

My close friend owns a mowing/landscape company and pulls his trailer with a 98 dodge 2500 V-10 and was averaging 8 mpg ! plus the gas for the mowers and so on his profit margin dropped significantly. I pity him.

 

I just filled up yesterday at $3.26 for regular. Diesel is $3.75. Unless I have to go somewhere the truck stays parked. No more riding around. I am going to have to start riding my Honda Shadow when I can. Which will only be when I can ride on back roads. It gets crazy here in the summer.

 

WOOD GAS make your own fuel it isn't as hard as it sounds!! FEMA used to supply
the instructions to make your own wood gas maker at home. They gave out the
instructions so during a national emergency people could have fuel to power their
generators in case liquid fuel and compressed gases got scarce. I am making a
small scale one to work out the thing and am just going to power a small motor and
devise some control circuits to better monitor it and then scale it up and run my
truck on it. This is old proven technology that got pushed to the wayside and not
many people remember that whole countries were being run on gas made from wood.
You actually are not burning the wood you are cooking the aromatics out of it along
with Co, methane and other gasses and you are essentially running on the fumes,
then you can use the charcoal that is left over to cook with!! No real conversion to
the motor is needed and it is similar to the pre emmision or off road diesel in comb
byproducts. There really isn't much in the way of smoke just some steam if the wood
is wet and you just have to go out and "FIRE" up your car 20 minutes before you have
to leave so it can get to temp. I pretty much have everything I need around the
house to make my small scale unit and you probably do to!!

 

To blue beast, post your results if possible and actually at work some of the guys in the shop mentioned messing around with hydrogen and built a tank of water with stainless steel brackets connected to two car batteries and after a couple of months and alot of experimenting they have succesfully run a lawn mower off of the hydrogen collected from the water and eletrical currents. nothing concrete yet but i bet by summer they will ahve something figured out.

 

We should be using Methanol instead of ethanol to add to the fuel it has more energy
and you can make it from a lot of things, Henry Ford actually had a Hemp field to use
to make methanol from to power his cars and prove it could work!! Of course it is big
bad drug marijuana so it won't ever happen in this country and for some reason they
think that methanol is too poisonous for use as a fuel but will put it in windshield fluid
of course gasoline is poisonous too. Back in the day you had the option of running
either gasoline or ethanol right at the pump and it didn't last then, I don't see why
they think it will work now!!

 

I'm sorry but ethanol has 1-1/2 times the btu content of methanol. More btu's equals more energy and better gas mileage.

 

With diesel at $4.00 a gal here, my trucks sits in the driveway alot. I only use it when I need it for a reason. No more joyrides or commuting to work with it.

 

my 2004 xterra that i had got worst mpg than my current explorer and the explorer has a v8 in it even.

i couldn't beleive something that small and underpowered got such horrible mpg.