Awesome thread! I was hoping someone would start this.
I'm going to print these out and start tinkering right away.
A thought concerning weight: The full sized spare tire is huge and heavy. Does anyone know of a dinky Tonka toy spare that might work instead? Perhaps from a junk yard?
Obviously, I would never use one off road but for my daily commute (60 mi/day nasty traffic) I am never further than a couple of miles from a tire or repair shop so I really don't a full sized spare is required. My wife said she liked the idea as long as hers had a Jeep cover cover on it.
I also removed my tire chains today (real chains) which probably weigh 30 lbs as well as some of the off road gear I usually have in the back. I am thinking of putting together an off road tray that is ready to go so that all I have to is slip the tray into the back before I leave.
I have been slowly but surely doing various mods suggested in this forum to my CRD while leaving my wife's bone stock as a comparison. One thing that might throw things off a bit is that I have aggressive snow tires while she has highway tires. Still, thus far I get a consistent 3 mpg better.
My hypermiling experiment: I read an interesting article on hypermiling the other day. There are even hypermiling derbies and contests with some people in Priuses obtaining over 90 mpg. A big part of the article consisted of disclaimers so people would not actually try some of the more dangerous activities such as turning the engine on and off in cars that require it for brakes and steering. Of course, I tried them anyway. I did everything I possibly could to keep the engine off and the car moving. I turned everything off, rolled up the windows. Every time I shut off the engine I immediately turned the key back on so the steering didn't lock and the mileage meter still calculated (I loved seeing it peg at 99 mpg down the hill from my house). At first it took a lot of getting used to - especially when I nearly ran into the ditch on a sharp corner after starting the engine back on & having the power steering suddenly awaken. But after an hour or so I got into the groove. I pulled all sorts of sh*t that was both dangerous and illegal to keep the car off and rolling: Running stop signs, drafting, running the right tires on the painted line, over inflated tires, turning off engine and coasting every single time I possibly could. Result: I was able to milk 42 mpg out of it. I checked and rechecked and hand calculated. Once I drove like "normal" it quickly came back down to it's usual 24 mpg mixed city/hwy. I don't recommend doing what I did (besides the danger I probably took a year off my starter life) however, after I thought about it a bit it occurred to me that a fair portion of the non-traffic-violation activities I was doing could have been designed into the car in a pseudo-hybrid model of this vehicle.
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