It's kinda too bad about those... They couldda been a good engine. And really they weren't "that" bad... They've got an amazingly stout lower end, with all kinds of "cheap" bolted on top of them. So there were lots of repairs to be done. And it costs a grand just to go in and find out what's wrong... They have so many "chains" of progressive damage, where you've got to find the failure that causes a symptom, AND find the root cause of the failure. Multiply that by the fact that they came out into the real world WAY before the service information got released, and there's still, twenty years later, more "tribal knowledge" from that which to this day just won't go away... We had those for a lotta years, both the Ford version and the International version. We pushed them out to some serious miles too. Some of the little wreckers might have got a hundred and a half thousand miles, some of the flatbed wreckers cleared 600 thousand. Made a good living with them. Not an "easy" living, as they were high maintenance, but still a good living. But every time one needed "something" far enough out that it went to an outside shop... I can't ever remember getting an outside repair that was complete or correct or actually SOLVED the problem beyond band-aiding it for a little while.
At this point, there are NONE left that have not had some unqualified hands in them, or been pushed along with multiple problems until the damages compounded to a whiskey tango foxtrot level (which appears the case with this engine), or been slammed with so many aftermarket parts that there's no practical way to keep up with the low design life of those "more economical" parts, or the "upgrades" and "tunes" that make an actual diagnosis into an impractical to an impossible undertaking... I wouldn't touch one today unless it was... to flip a good running one. I wouldn't want to own one, as it's not financially feasible to "bring one back", and I wouldn't touch a retail job on one, as it's a guaranteed comeback for the "what else is still broken after the complaint is resolved" situation, (which ain't my monkey and sure as heck isn't free...). For Joe Customer who owns one but isn't qualified to understand that engine, they make good mechanic's look like crooks. You just can't do good work on these engines without a solid baseline, and if you haven't owned it since new, you have NO solid baseline to work from as to how far and how deep the issues might be in order to make the engine "right", simply because you have NO IDEA what somebody's done to that engine... Mechanical faults are solvable, but imagining how somebody could have buggered something, bypassed something, "tuned out" a particular trouble code to get them to run broken....
It's really too bad. They could have been good.
