Little update from this past week. Brett Davis aka
@Maverick killed his 4R100 trans (turned out to be a torque converter) heading to Trail Hero last week. He secured a’14 F350 6.7 to tow his Excursion back home and asked if I’d go down and grab his Jeep and tow back with him.
I left work at 2:30 pm and tried to boogie (remember my tire/spindle/bearing issue on my trailer?) as I knew we were in for a potentially long day. I enjoyed almost 10 mpg towing my 6000 lb trailer south to St George. Really starting to like this truck as it gets that on bad commuting days (kind of it's use as we build our house). Lost an outer trailer wheel bearing at 5pm in Beaver (jokes aplenty there) and we had that fixed and headed back towards St George by 6.
We got loaded up and headed for home. I had last fueled in Beaver on my way down and had just under half a tank of fuel left. Should get me to Cedar City even factoring in the almost constant hills?
That proved to be poor logic with a V10. Short bed Super Duty trucks are stupid because of their 25ish gallon fuel tanks. After running uphill into that now strong headwind to Cedar and able to maintain 70 mph (rarely below 3500 rpm and running in third gear about 4400-4700 RPM a lot of the time) I found that a Super Duty short bed fuel tank can take 29.5 gallons of fuel. The headwind was pushing my 7500 lb truck and 11k plus trailer load around pretty good at times.
My 50 mile fuel light came on about 15-20 miles short of Cedar. About 3-4 miles after that, I got pinged that I only had 25 miles to go and still had 15-12 miles to Cedar. I started watching for ANYTHING resembling a gas station in the night. Kicked down to about 60 and 3500 rpm while I watched the display tell me I’d be out of fuel in 10, 9, 8 etc miles. Talking with Brett on the HAM he was confident we could just hook the 6.7L ford to my truck and just drag it to the next stop if needed. I ran about 4-5 miles after the display told me I was out of fuel.
Run from St George this Cedar my active display told me I was getting 3.2 mpg. The trail wind that got me 10+ mpg on the way down was now KILLING me on the the way back.
Looks like those tanks can take 29 gallons? I think I’ll stick to the 23-24 gallon thoughts though. In the future, I'll stick to keeping the V10 above half a tank when climbing hills similar to St George-Cedar. I learned my lesson from Cedar to Fillmore and stopped in Fillmore for fuel before trying to stretch to Nephi.
I was a little surprised at the good and then poor mileage. My EJS trip to Moab with two Jeeps on the trailer was 7.1 on the way down and 6.8 mpg on the way back. Getting 10.5 or so on the way down and then 3.1 from St George to Cedar and the display got to 5.5-5.7 by the time we hit Provo was a little disappointing but I'll have to factor in the headwind while climbing a pretty respectable hill for 50 miles.
All in all, I still think the truck is a good value. It does the work I want it to. Like anything else, I need to learn it's limitations. If confronted with a strong headwind while towing, I think I'll have to drop the speed down a little more than I like? Time will tell