Tuning for fuel milage? Options

[AWD DSM 1]

Hypothetically, would it be possible to tune a car to get better milage than what it came with from the factory? Lower the boost, take out some fuel?

[awd4kicks]

This will be a good thread for NC Galant to respond to. This may end up in the Tech section because of it though.

When NC and I were tuning in the stroker we were running on crazy lean mixture at cruising speeds. This would make for some incredible mileage and seemed to have no adverse affects like knock while driving.

On the flip side I am wondering if this extreme lean condition attributed to the warpage found on some of my vavles recently? This is only a theory but here is where I'm comming from...

This head has been freshened about 3 times in the past two years durring various stages of my stroker trial & error project. The last time it was in the shop, I had 3 valves replaced from a bad rocker coming loose and causing collateral damage. This was in the spring/summer of 2006. At that time all the other valves which probably had less than 1000 miles on them, looked fine to Kalina Machine. A couple months later, a pile of tunning trips and a broken rod later (about 800mi.) the valves in cylinder three where the rod broke are obviously bent. Strangely 8 other valves are bent or warped. Kalina says that they have been seeing this type of thing more and more with leaner burning engines and crappier gas (This is just on daily driven comuter cars BTW).

NC and I did make a number of WOT pulls in the Talon and there was considerable knock a lot of the time, but it was in a semi-controlled environment. The Talon was never in a race against anything after the last head repair. The only all out runs were while on the logger with another set of eyes keeping watch. There were also never any full-on 1st through 4th or 5th gear pulls like a drag race.

Most of the time we did have the ultra lean cruise mixture though. It's not definetive, and any one of those WOT runs could have caused the problem, but it raises the question about ultra lean cruise tune.

A final point I would like to bring up for discussion is that I purchase Ferrera valves everytime I need valves. They are about four times the price of stock valves and I buy them for a reason. Or at least I thought I did. The old 'get what you pay for' and 'buy a piece of mind' addages prevailed in my decisions when replacing the valves each time. Well, with less than 2000 miles and no real races under their belt, I'm wondering if it's worth the quadrupled price tag to buy them. I will need to bring that up in a new thread.