TopGhia

I just found this on another forum. Shows how good the 302 motor is:

"A buddy of mine has an early 90's Ford pick-up with a 100,000 mile 302 in it. He got it for cheap and had to spray the oil pump pick up screen with carb cleaner through the drain hole to get the thing to have desent oil pressure. The motor is very nasty inside due to the fact that the oil must have never been changed before he got the truck.

The truck runs great and uses no oil to speak of. He has been running Rotella T 15W40 and changing it every 2000 miles to try and easily clean some of the gick from the engine. He has even pulled the valve covers and cleaned all the mess out from under them and dropped the oil pan as far as he could and spooned out a tub of junk."

He later corrected this and said the mileage was 215,000. That is 346,000 kilometres. Not bad for an engine in that condition.

cheers

ford4v429

My mom just got rid of her 93(I think) thunderbird- 320,000 miles on a 3.8 v6-
sold to a girl she works with, who's still driving it. My grandfather had a late 80's f150 with 300 I6, he sold it to one of his drivers with over 300K on it- I still see it around once in a while. Hope my '93 lasts half that distance- will last me another 15 years!

My grandfather told me the way he cleaned sludge from old engines- he had a trucking company that he run up till a year before he died, and did all his own repairs, and knew a few things...Ive done it on a couple really gunked up older motors, and it works great, but hey I trusted my grandpa- up to you to decide if it sounds too crazy:
he told me to warm it up, so choke was off(low idle rpm)drain oil, put a fresh filter on, dump in a gallon of #2 diesel and two-three quarts of oil(overfill by one quart), fire it up and let it idle 15 minutes- told me not to touch the gas or it would seize the bearings(oil pressure idiot light will stay lit the whole time). You would not believe how much crap came out upon draining the pan. said change filter and oil, run it normal for a day or two, then change it again. Castings look like new under valvecovers afterwards. I worried it might clog up pump or internals, but he said he'd never had a problem doing this, and it would all flush out.
I did it to my 429 a few months before I wrecked the car, no problems, and did a 350 chevy that I had dumped a can of that "oil leak fixer" crap in(hey- I was 16 and even more stupid than now) that basically turned the oil into jelly- cleaned it spic and span, drove it for a year without problems. Intend on doing the 289 in the old 65 galaxie too, as soon as I get the car running again- my neighbor liked quakerstate oil(my grandpa swore this was worst for sludge) high parrafin=lots of sludge...its ugly inside with only 50 some odd thousand miles on it... we'll see what happens.

__________________
Confidence: that feeling you have just before you realize the mess you've gotten yourself into...