sorry i haven't been back lately. i've been extremely busy. the 4.7 aspen i drove when i went for training in atlanta got 21.2 according to the evic. i typically see numbers around 17 or so in customer cars. it's a good choice and easily doable. the down side is the cluster set up will be a tad more complicated. unfortunatly i haven't got any advice on the cluster prob. but ppl have done them and made it work well.

 

I haven't been able to find much on Aspen's, what is the curb weight of a new Aspen? My Dakota is about 3500 lbs, so I'm wondering is moving the 4.7L to my Dakota going to be much of a weight change for the engine? I would assume that moving that engine to lighter vehicle would make the fuel economy go up (a little) because the engine isn't having to work as much to make the vehicle move.

As far as the cluster goes, I figure when I take the wiring harness from the donor vehicle, I'll take all the components from that vehicle as well and fabricate my own dash and air vents from ABS plastic so that I can make all the dash pieces from the donor fit my custom made dash.

However, I'm starting to run into another problem: my wife just decided to tell me to put the brakes on till we get out of this apartment and have a place of our own with a garage. But, I'm not giving up, just gonna have to slow down some. I did spoil her some when I taught her how to change her oil - I had her laying on the ground in the mud with the car up on ramps when I taught her how . Then I took her to the autocraft center on Fort Benning and put the car up on a lift - she now agree's I can have a lift for my garage when we get our own place. She refuses to do oil changes on anything other than a lift now.