The family B-GT was pressed into commuting service once again due to the
recent fuel price increases. The alternative was to keep driving the
carbureted 360ci hog that is our '91 Jeep Grand Wagoneer - 15 mpg on a
good day. In the B-GT, I daily load my five year old in the back (in a
nifty safety harness that is DOT approved, btw) and my nine year old
rides up front. They get dropped at daycare and it takes me another 40
minutes to get to work. Doing it in a B makes the ride much more
bearable. Getting 25 mpg on a Peter Burgess motor is not too bad in my
estimation, though I had to retard the ignition a little just to run
straight pump high test fuel instead of the race fuel blend it was used
to. The real economic move might be to change the distributor and
reduce the compression ratio enough so that it will run on regular. One
observation about the recent surge in fuel prices: it seems high test
is still only x cents higher than regular, so the percentage cost
difference has gone down. There was a time when 94 octane was sometimes
15-20% more expensive, now maybe only 6-7%.
Dean
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