Thanks TDR

[kiwi bird]

Used some more info from the members here when we drove to Oklahoma last week.

We left Los Angeles on Sunday morning heading for Stillwater OK, driving my 02 HO, towing my 16 foot high profile toybox trailer and loaded down with 5 dirtbikes, 60 gals of water, 40 gals of bike gas, all our gear (tents, EZups, tables) and all the food for 10 days camping - about 7000 pounds load, nothing to a lot of you guys but more than I had towed with the truck before.

My driving buddy - a CHP officer, and I were so damned excited to be off on vacation to meet with 300 other like minded idiots that we were talking up a storm and drove past Barstow instead of stopping for fuel.

No problem we thought, we'll stop at the next place. Oops, no diesel!

The lady in the station said "It's 27 miles back to Barstow or 56 miles to Oasis, you don't want to run out in the 104 degree desert".

We looked at each other and the gas guage on "E" and said "Are we not men?" and proceeded to go forward.

50 miles later (we could see the gas station) the mighty Cummins coughed, sputtered and rolled to a halt.

We looked at each other sheepishly as we rolled in to a rest stop and Elk called his dispatcher. Within minutes a fellow CHPer arrived and gave a good ribbing about running out of fuel and then got a call in to the local tow dude.

While we were waiting for the tow truck to arrive a couple of big rigs came in to the stop and we managed to talk a couple of gallons of diesel out of them.

Now comes the thanks part - I had read (once!!) about how to prime the truck after running out of fuel. Messed around with the fuel filter until it was full - good lift pump - and then couldn't remember which injector to pull the line on. Tried number 4 but it didn't come out enough so tried number 5 and finally got fuel and then resecured it and started the truck. Man it sounded cool, whole truck shaking and puffing smoke as the cylinders started to fire and then running clean.

Onward we went to Oklahoma, 21 hours straight.

We started out at 75 getting nearly 14mpg and then upped it to 80 mph and only dropped to 11, we tried 82/83 but we dropped to below 8, so settled on 80mph.

I couldn't believe how strong the truck felt at 80mph, still had power to pass and never dropped speed unless we had traffic, no matter how steep the hill.

The whole trip has just reconfirmed how killer good the truck is and towing is just the icing on the cake.

Thanks to all for the wealth of information here.