5th Gear upgrade and more MPG’s

So now being a motor caravan and legally being able to travel at 70mph I often find myself sat between 55mph to 65mph on the motorway as doing long distance with the engine screaming can get a bit tedious.

Ever since I upped the fuel and boost I have wanted to put a high ratio 5th gear in the gearbox but have just not got around to it. But with a trip from Scotland to the Isle of Wight looming I decided that it was about time I got this sorted.

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If I was at home in Cornwall this is a task I would undertake myself there are lots of guides out there and all going well it should be an easy task. But being in Scotland and only having a few tools and the risk of something going wrong and not being able to sort it I decided to get it done for me. And really by the time I had bought a puller and large star bits I only ended up paying someone £20 extra than it would have cost to do it myself.

I had a recommendation for V-Worx in Ayr which was not to far from me so sent them some messages and was more than happy to book it in. We ended up setting off early in the morning for Ayr and stopped into V-Worx on the way to the Isle of Wight. It took them 2 hours to switch the gears and top up the gearbox oil while I went for a wonder around the town.

I have done a lot of reading on the different ratios and choose to go with the 0.658 ratio. Obviously you have to be very careful here as too much and you may bog down changing from 4th to 5th, too little and it would have been hardly worth doing. And as soon as I got in and set off on our way it was massively noticeable and a why didn’t I do this sooner realisation.

So first up was driving on some hilly A roads and this is the only problem where as before I could had just sat in 5th gear I was now occasionally having to drop back to 4th just not to loose speed when climbing a long climb but this was down at around 40mph so not much of a bother.

So getting out onto the Motorway and the first real test I pull onto the slip lane get upto 60mph in 4th and merge change to 5th and upto 70mph. WOW.. That sums it up as soon as you get to 5th the Revs drop right back and the engine is just purring away and you can now just sit there comfortably at 70 without the radio turned up and being able to hold a non shouting conversation.

So with the Long drive to Isle of Wight I had filled up the tank before setting of and made the drive to the island and spent four days driving around doing about 590 miles before topping the tank up and calculating that I had got 34mpg on that tank. On the Isle of Wight I had done about 150 miles of stop start driving so that would not been good on the figure so I am super happy with that as previously I have averaged between 28mpg to 30mpg.