Gas Mileage Options

[gemStudio]

Just wonderin what kind of mods I can get to improve mileage. I have only had my 95 ST for about 2-3 weeks now and so far I have gotten 26 and 22 mpg. Is this bad? it is mostly city so I dun know.

[94GT]

All of those parts (rotor, dist cap, new plugs, and new wires) cost me 75 dollars. It's cheap. By the way, I live in Colorado, but my car is a California version, so those parts are actually different! Make sure you know which type yours is before you buy the part so you only have to do the job once. If you trace your spark plug wires back from the valve cover to where they plug in, that is the distributor cap. It has two hex nut screws attaching it to the engine. You unplug the wires, unbolt the distributor cap, and you'll see this little spinner underneath called the rotor, or rotor button. It is attached with two phillips head screws. The idea is that the rotor button carries voltage, and as the engine spins, the rotor button spins around the distributor cap and makes contact with each of the four spark plug wires in sequence. This is what gets the + voltage to your spark plug and causes it to fire. The metal contact on the rotor button gets corroded after a while, and so do the contacts that it delivers spark to in the distributor cap. It looks just like the corrosion you see on old spark plug tips. This is a fairly easy maintenance job that shouldn't take much more than 30 minutes. Just be real careful not to drop those tiny screws into the engine bay like I did last weekend! That sucked!

Here are some pics:


valve cover with new wires. You can sort of see the distributor cap on the right.



Distributor cap is the orange looking part.

This post has been edited by 94GT: Apr 1, 2005 - 10:57 AM