Hello folks,
My name is Tom, and I've been lurking on your site for a couple of years now. Your forum is the absolute first place I look to find information on my truck, and I want to thank you all for helping me. My truck has about 115,000 miles on it, and I'm going to keep it until the freaking wheels fall off. I don't drive it that often, and I work/tinker on it while I drive my other car. The mods that I have done so far are:1) K&N air filter element, 2) Airbox mod, 3) Excelerator cable mod, 4) jba shorty headers, 5) Screamin Demon Coil, 6)Denso Iridium IT20TT plugs, gapped at .065. I am currently replacing the entire exhaust with Magnaflow (front catalytic converters, rear catalytic converter, dual cat-back system). My truck currently gets 16.4 mpg in the city (that's driving like an old lady and using the cruise control). I'm going to try to improve on that. My future plans are lighter wheels, throttle body replacement or mod of the original, electric fan, and lastly, some professional tuning. I'm approaching retirement age soon, and my days of hotrodding are officially over. In my younger days, I was an auto mechanic. I'm heavy into efficiency now.. I hope we can all share some good information on these great trucks. Thanks.

 

Welcome to the forum, as a poster

The 4.0l SOHC engines run 9.7:1 compression ratio, so they can't really run well on 87 octane without some pinging.
So Ford installed a Knock sensor, this allows for lower octane fuel to be used, but also reduces power and so MPG when running Regular gasoline.

So MPG would improve with higher octane but..........will that offset the cost of higher gallon price?
Don't know

Anything to lighten the load will help MPG

Electric cooling fan is a double bonus, one of the ONLY things that gives more power and better MPG.
Most of the time those two things are mutually exclusive, lol
More power = more fuel = lower MPG

Vacuum gauge in the cab can help out.
Best MPG is, of course, at highest vacuum, but also helps determine if you have any air restriction at wide open throttle(WOT), you want to be under 2" vacuum at WOT under load, but be careful, speeding tickets can occur when testing this, lol.

 

Thanks for the info Ron.
I haven't ever heard it ping.
My take on the bad gas mileage is that Ford Rangers are considered utility vehicles.
You see many of them used to run parts.
I don't think the PCM's are programmed for fuel economy, but just to have the engines run well for reliability.
I do realize that programming is the best way to get the most MPG out of the engine.
That's why, I'm going to do all of my other mods first, then the programming last.

 

Yes, good idea for that order of things.

As long as Knock sensor is working you should never "hear" a ping, spark timing is changed, advanced, when Knock sensor detects it, which happens before you would hear it.

Any compression ratio above about 9.4:1 can ping on 87 octane once it is warmed up and under a load