SierraExplorer said:
It's funny that you bring up the power with the motor. Mine is pretty gut-less right now when completely loaded. I swore up and down i wouldnt touch the engine performance, but now i'm gonna cave. Any suggestions on how to bump up the power on 22RE without slicing the wallet?
I think there are a number of sources for powering up a 22r motor. As the greasy old mechanic said in "Mad Max", "Speed's just a question of money. How fast do you want to go?"
But I can't help but think that a lot of our perceptions on what is "underpowered" are based on
expectations rather than on actual
needs. When I was a kid we had a VW bus and we would take long distance family road trips in that thing. I think the engine was about 65hp, (roughly the same as my 500lb motorcycle.) Of course the thing was "gutless" compared to the V-8 equipped station wagon we traded in on the VW, but we accepted the tradeoff (this was in '74 right after the first gas crisis.)
Going back even farther, the Jeeps of WWII had, IIRC, 60hp motors, and the Dodge 3/4 ton trucks (which weighed 5,000# empty) had about 90hp. Yet, they were able to move around just fine.
Obviously, the WWII experience isn't an exact parallell, since they didn't have to worry about keeping up with traffic on 80mph freeways, but the point is that plenty of people around the world get by with 100hp or less in their motors and it doesn't keep them from being able to travel. They may not have that neck-snapping accelleration that we love in the US, but then again, neither do they have that wallet-draining MPG.