I agree w/Frank. Sorry I missed yr earlier post. The 195.6 OHV in an american is probably not much less powerful than the 232 in my classic wagon, and if it is, it's a small amount. The key is to pick speed/load on the car so that the car is happy, not necessarily you :-). On the 600 miles up to Burning Man (Gerlach NV) from Los Angeles, 95% of the driving is 60 mph; a camp trailer, tons o'crap for 2 - 4 people for over a week (2, 3 people in the car) and the last 150 miles, 40 - 50 gallons of water plus groceries. Most of it is over 5000 foot altitude, and there is 100 miles of over 7000. For that 5% that's upgrade, I gooooo slooooooow. Hell, crawl in 1st with the flashers on on two sections of 6% grade above 5000. Who cares what others think? I'm have no need to impress people with my ability to brute-force my way there. One of those I drive via the transmission temperature gauge; it gets close to 280 degrees. (Most of the time it's 160 - 190 for that trip.) I do that hot-trans grade once in a year. About 5 miles of it. At 15,000 miles/year, That's 0.03% of the time. Most people would get the biggest V8 and heaviest duty everything and drive that 100% of the time to solve the 0.03% problem, but that has other costs and hassles. I like my easy comfortable flexible wagon and it's done this for me for 20 years. When the going gets tough, the smart slow down :-) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://list.amc-list.com/pipermail/amc-list-amc-list.com/attachments/20100218/c7a8541b/attachment.htm> _______________________________________________ AMC-list mailing list AMC-list@xxxxxxxxxxxx http://list.amc-list.com/listinfo.cgi/amc-list-amc-list.com