gear changes for better towing

lancekeys wrote:

I am thinking of possibly changing the gears to raise my RPM so that I will have more power at a slower speed. My truck has the factory original 3.55 gears and I was thinking that switching to 3.73 or 4.11 would help.

As others have said, you cannot increase power by changing your gears. But you're not trying to increase power, you're trying to make more available at a slower speed.

If you're happy with the power you currently have at 70mph, but want that same power at 60mph, you need to re-gear such that the RPMs you now have at 70mph will be what you get at 60mph. 70 / 60 ~= 1.17, so you need about a 17% increase in RPM, and therefore a 17% change in gear ratio, to make that happen.

If you're currently running 3.55s, you'll need 3.55 * 1.17 ~= 4.15. In other words, 4.10s will give you pretty close to what you want.

-- Rob