matthewq4b

Nothing will, the Flaresides has a 115" wheelbase and the Stylside has a 131" wheelbase. If you want a styleside find another truck, no point cutting up the rarer and more valuable flareside.

Someone dropped the ball at Ford insuring the bed was as puncture resistant as a steel one. And no bed liners should not be the fix for an inadequately puncture resistant bed floor. The old trucks never had this issue and go back to the 70's the only way you were puncturing those galvanized steel bed floors was if you were using a drill and bit. The easy solution is to make the bed floor out of the same material as is used in the aluminium M1101 trailers on their bed floors. You can hardly dent that stuff with a sledge hammer let alone puncture it, and the weight penalty would be less than a spray in bed liner. That is the easiest solution for a proper fix. Then Ford can add Mil Spec truck bed to the advertising tag line.

The narrow bore mods were not meant for trucks The bottom end was never designed to take the loading experienced in the trucks. The narrow bore mods were not designed for low RPM torque or the High loading low at RPM's that trucks see. The short compacted block served no practical purpose in the trucks. Simple as that. Ford knifed the the crank throws squished the cylinders as much as they could with out actually siameseing them to get length down as short as possible. Which is not a design consideration in trucks. Also dimensional changes were listed. As for the fleet Manager who do you think he reported to ?. Come on Richard you are grasping again. And not following Ford recommended service intervals seriously. Really any company that services their own fleet generally exceeds manufacturers recommended service intervals and generally does oil analyses to spot issues before they become problems when equipment can not afford to break down on the job. The cost of losing a piece of equipment on job can cost more than piece of equipment it's self. This has been state here before but to recap, there were to be 3 configurations of Mods. Smaller displacement engines for things like a 3.5L V8 and V6's Mid displacement 4.6 Etc. And a series of truck V8's up to 7.0L the truck engines were not partially siamesed bores like the smaller mods to promote even cooling of the cylinders offered better deck support for head gasket retention and had 385 width bearing shells.. Saleen even played with 7.0L Mod in the mid late 90's before opting for the SBF based 7.0L for their SL but the SL has enough engine bay width to take a mod motor.. You think the 6.2L liters Bore of 4.015" is a mistake? Couple that with the V10's 4.165" stroke and you basically get 7.0L All mods were to share common design elements and as many parts as possible. That was whole premise of the mods and it was stated over and over and again common design elements and common architecture across all engines. Sort of like the 6.2L is a mod just on a larger bore spacing. This is where Auto CAD which at the time just recently could be used with out a dedicated math co-processor allowed this to be done. As you could increase and decrease dimensions with a couple clicks with out having to manually redraft the whole piece. That is in part why the mods were developed as they could have dimensions changed using common building blocks. Individual or paired cylinder assemblies could be configured any way you desired with relative ease as an individual building block. That was the whole premise behind the mods. It was designed so it could fully utilize the advances in Autocad and reduce the labour involved in designing new engine assembles as all the base dimensional work was already done, it was just a matter of assembling what you wanted in the dimensions you desired with a few clicks in auto cad that is what made the mod so revolutionary. Get off this there was to be only be one mod BS. That was never ever the intention of the Mod program and this has been stated from numerous sources. But that is what it ended up being due to cost cutting. A fact you have conveniently chose to ignore, Ford under went some pretty drastic cost cutting in the mid nineties and piles of projects were shelved during the era with personnel cuts even exceeding the projects being shelved including most of the mod program and it led to platforms that languishing long past their best before date.

Seriously Richard passive aggressive much come on what are you 6? If that is the best you can bring to the conversation...... Fact The mods in trucks have had issues with bottom end failures and to a lesser degree in the Mustang GT. Fact Cylinders 4 and 8 are the guilty suspects 99% of the time due to being at the end of the oil feed and the load carrying capability of the bearing is so marginal they will be the ones to fail first. Fact Ford has revised the bearing material and dimensions, the cranks, and the oil pump in the mods to combat this issue. And not just doing those changes for fun as you are trying to imply. And you seem to have forget that back in that day I knew powertrain development engineers with Ford. And even commented when they got retried early during the Nasser era engineering purge. So I may just have a bit more insight on this than you realize. Like it or not Richard your attempt at deflection and mis-direction does not change the facts. So you can

If ther were designed for truck service form the get go like lets say the 6.2L or the 300 6 Ford would have not had bottom end bearing issues. Ford has not had bottom end issues with any motor placed in trucks before or since. So what you are saying is Ford's engineering dept dropped the ball on the most comprehensive thoroughly engineered and thoroughly thought out family of V8's they have ever built on something as simple as load calculations for the bottom ends, I mean we are talking first year engineering stuff here. So you again either Ford's engineers were completely and totally incompetent. Or the engine was pressed in to service it was not designed for. Regardless of everything else what makes more sense ? Ford was completely incompetent on their most comprehensively engineered family of engines. Or it was pressed in to a service it was not originally intended for due to cost cutting ? Not like we seen any cost cutting at all in the mid 90's at Ford, heavens no.

Almost all company;s with large fleets of trucks and other equipment have an on staff mechanic it is just a matter of cost efficiency. I don not know one company that has fleet over 50 Trucks and many less that does not have an in house mechanic. It is just a matter of cost savings. Why pay $100+ Hr (here anyways) for dealer service when you can have a tech on staff for half that. And the oil leak was an annoyance. The failuers were coolant or cylinder to cylinder. Just do a quick search and see how many you can pull up in 10 mins. Although not what you could call a common problem it was not exactly rare either. And Ford revised parts and changed dimensions for the fun of it ? Come on, now you are just being silly.

I understand what your saying Jp but when you design a piece of equipment you design it for the whole bell curve not just points A to M. Doing anything else is incompetent or due to cost cutting. Ford know's full well the service it;'s trucks see and what has made them the best selling has been from offering trucks that will work and continue to work across the whole bell curve. We were not alone in seeing these failures either. It was an issue with the mods like it or not those are the facts. Have we seen any bottom end failures in the 6.2L related to design issues. I have not heard of a single one has anyone else, probably not. Why ? Because the engine was designed for all the types of service it would see in the SD not just soccer moms but also slugging it out with overloaded service bodies clawing their way across unimproved service roads or mine sites. Simple fact is bottom end failures in the cars are almost unheard of, in the trucks such is not the case. If the bottom end was solid from the get go there would have been no reason to revise the bearings or increase the surface area simple as that. Bearings work or they don;t for the application installed there is no half way.

LOL the 5.4 was done, developed by 1992. All they did was stuff the 2V heads on it that were already in use, there was nothing to develop Richard it was a parts swap. And that was the whole premise of the mods from the get go.

If there were no issues Ford would have not revised the Bearings umpteen times and eventually increased the surface area. Im pretty sure that was not done just for giggles. And bottom end failures were generally a higher mileage issue that occurred after trucks were out of warranty. Long after they has stopped going to the dealer. Our bottom end failure rate in our trucks was between 25 to 30%. Mind you our trucks seen extreme severe service. But this was a non issue with SBF and 385 equipped trucks I donlt we ever lost the bottom end a SBF or 385 equipped truck We did tend to melt the exhausts off the 385's but that was whole other issue. The V10's also did not lose bottom ends their issue seemed to head gaskets, even had to the head gaskets in the Excursion before I sold it. As anecdotal as your experience was Ford seemed to think other wise and worked at many revisions to try to solve it.

Richard you have given anything proving other wise. One artical that mentions a common bore spacing in like applications. Or did you miss that bit? Not to mention most of what else you have posted has been either faulty or erroneous. And the most telling thing we eventually got a larger bore spaced mod in the trucks. That solved ALL the issues encountered in the base mods in the trucks. We all know why the mods were never expanded upon the cost cutting during the Nasser era. Here is a question what purpose would tight bore spacing serve in the mods. What possible benefit would be seen from it ?

The 4.6 Intech (4V) was used in the Mk VIII, Continental, Mustang , Marauder, and the Aviator. it was also used by others like Koenigsegg, and Panoz plus a few others if I remember right.

They also use aluminum rods not sure you would want those in a truck engine. What applies to drag racing has little to no relevance to road vehicles getting an engine to hang together for a few passes before rebuild is a little different than getting to hang to together for a couple hundred K under conditions from -40 to 100F plus..

Sorry Richard you are wrong on the FE bit The Fe did serve in the MD's They had the 330, 359,361 and 391 Motors. There were the heavy duty versions of the FE and were actually called FT's They had higher nickle content blocks steel cranks and forged roads. Their application was in the medium duty trucks. The 391 Crank is popular swap for the 390 it just needs the crank snout turned down to match the 390's Diam. And the SBF actually has been the most versatile engine Ford has ever made with displacements from 221 to 351 . it;s architecture spawned the 240 and 300 I6 the 3,8L and 4.2L V6 are based on the SBF. 335 series it is basically an SBF Ford with a dry intake to limit intake charge heating, the 385 Series which is just an over grown SBF with larger bore spacing. The SBF has by far been Fords most versatile engine design to date. The architecture has seen use from Luxury cars to Indy to trucks both pick up and MD to Le Mans in Marine applications to NASCAR, in mid sized cars in I6 and V6 Configurations, industrial applications heck you have think hard for an application the SBF or it;s derivatives have not been used in. The Mod is no where near the most versatile engine architecture Ford has made.That title goes to the SBF The Mod was planned to be the most versatile architecture, think of it as SBF 2.0, but it never materialized, so again so much potential wasted. The mod was introduced and the architecture stalled other than giving us a V10 and a V12 it went no where for years and only just recently gave us the larger bore spaced 6.2L. So what did Ford do in the end exactly what was originally planned from the onset. Spread the bore and offer a truck engine based on the Mod. How has the 6.2L performed ? No bottom end failures, no spit plugs no major issues at all. In time it will prove it's self to be the best gas V8 Ford has ever offered in the trucks. Exactly as a mod should be, too bad this was not done 15 plus years ago. It would have saved Ford untold millions and they would have not had to be doing damage control over plugs and cratered bottom ends. We can thank Nasser for that, for his profits at any cost mentality want to point the finger at someone as why the mod was never developed to is full potential, there is the guy. And we all know what his directorship of Ford led to.

The bottom end the was problematic enough to require multiple bearing revisions and an increase in surface area. It was an issue big and wide spread enough to require dimensional changes to solve it. With my previous employer we had a large fleet of mostly Ford trucks we generally kept them till 300K KM or about 185K miles as by that point they were basically worn out and beat to death. By far the biggest reason trucks did not make it to 300K was due to bottom end failures in mod equipped vehicles. it got to the point that it was becoming endemic enough we went to Ram for a short period of time. Good drive lines but crap trucks. We just resorted to getting rid of the MOD powered trucks at 200K. This was never an issue in SBF or 385 series powered vehicles. In those the bores wore out before the bottom end's cratered. And plug mounting should never have to be repaired period. That is not what you would call a service item. And the only reason the heads did not have to be is because the issue is so prevalent and common a whole cottage industry has sprung up offering solutions to fix it. Initially Ford was replacing cylinder heads on mods with spit plugs. And pulling heads with with stuck 3V plugs. Until tools were designed and built to remedy the issue in truck, and even there is no 100% guarantee you wont have to pull the head in the end. The LS was designed as replacement for the SBC it was not designed as truck engine, but to do service in the trucks. Which it has done with out component failure due to lack of load carrying ability. The failures have been design related not load related. The issues in the LS are not more prevalent in one application than another but pretty much evenly spread across all the applications it is used in. Such was not the case with the mods. The Mods were excellent motors in the cars. Such was not the case in the trucks.

Bingo it was planned to enter production but that never materialized either.

Richard that artical was a bit of fluff all Manufacturers adopt those with engine designs. What was revolutionary about the mod was the ability to use common design across all engine applications irrespective of number cylinders bore spacing, Bore size stroke size or engine configuration. That is what was revolutionary about the mod architecture. As NO engine had been designed to do that previously We finally seen some expansion in the Mod architecture with the 6.2L. It is a large displacement larger bore spacing MOD. Tightening bore spacing would allow you to use everything, but the heads crank and cam and of course the block. Every thing else would transfer over. Same thing applies to widening the bore spacing but of course widening it you would take advantage of the larger available bore and larger available bearing surfaces. There was enough material in the bottom end of the mod to allow for them to squeeze bore spacing a bit this is why Ford was able to widen the bearings in later iterations to try to solve bottom end issues as that extra material was already there to allow a squeeze in bore spacing with out compromising the the rotating assembly. This part of the fore though that went in to the MOD's It is not bias it is the truth the architecture was planned to be the base for all of Ford's engines From 4 cylinders to 6 to 8's and V12's and we got none of 6's none 4s and the GT 90's V12. That was never produced en mass. So there was so much planned potential never utilized. Has nothing to do with bias but facts.

Design work on on the ninth gen Conit was completed in 1991 Richard The Final design prototype was unveiled in 1992 with a Mod under hood. Here it is. (see below) So yes the Mod was planned for FWD applications. With the 4.38" bore spacing of the SBF and 335's the Mod's would not fit under hood of a laterally mounted FWD. In addition It also was needed to keep the planned V6's length down for FWD applications.

Trucks, sort of like the 6.2L A mod with larger bore spacing. Ford eventually went that route in the end.

Common Cylinder and combustion chamber design means exactly that the design is common. For example could you have used the Quench 351C chamber on the 385 Engines ? Absolutely. Could you use the open open chamber design? Yup and it was. The cylinder design is more subjective it could be internal block supporting structure it could be piston speeds and rod ratios bolt patterns. The 300 I6 and the SBF share a common chamber design and cylinder also. See how this can be applied to engines that externally have zero resemblance to each other. You would have never guessed that the 240, 300 6 and the SBF share a common architecture. If you noticed no where did it say BLOCK. there were individual items not tied to a fixed set of dimension but a set design philosophy. Items that would and could share a common architecture scaled relative to the application. As for the 3.5 decking the block you would have just lost 90% of the part commonality to share with the other mods. Tightening the the bore spacing would have reduced over all engine length witch is more important in FWD's than width and not lost significant torque and that is what V8's are about in NA. or done both and shared closer dimensions with a V6 MOD The 5.4LV8 was introduced 1992 in the newly redesigned 1993 Lincoln MK VIII as a possible top engine option I remember this distinctly as I was at an invitational here in town when it was unveiled and remember thinking if they build I will buy it. . It unfortunately never made it in to the Mk VIII. If offered we may have seen it as an option for the Mustang for 1994/5 and that would have really sent GM scurrying.. So it;s introduction was not exactly shall we say as a potential truck engine. But as a Hot Rod Lincoln motor that could kick the asses of Mercedes and BMW's. What happend to the Mod V6's ? exactly what what happened to the rest of the mod program it went no where. So much potential all flushed away

Hmm Fords proposed response tot he Viper that got cancelled.

All these are valid points but it glosses over the fact that the mod needed significant rework and redesign to become what you could call a reliable 300,000 Mile motor in the F Series. it took Ford basically 10 years to achieve this. Ask yourself this did any other family of Ford gasoline motors require 10 years of refinement to finally meet their requirements reliably? Did the mods need 10 years of refinement to do this in other applications? No they did not. I mean these were not minor issues either. When you lose the bottom end in a motor it does not get any more catastrophic than that. The other stuff is just icing on the cake. Heck a whole cottage industry sprung up offering solutions to the spark plug issues Not even issue but issue's. The mods in the truck have been the most flawed gasoline engines to ever grace the F series. I dare anyone to name one gasoline engine family that has been worse. (If you say the 3.8L I'll give ya that but it was pulled after just 2 years fortunately) Yes they have their strong points but so did Nash's and the Monza V8. The V10 did not suffer bearing failures just due to the lower HP per cylinder this has been pointed out in the past here several times. And short block and long stroked does not necessarily inherently make it more ridged block it does the opposite as you have much higher stress's on the crankcase area with less material to absorb those stress's, that is why the Mods had to be deep skirted. The same thing applies to VW's W engines they need a bed plate to stabilize the block. Believe me if Ford could have gotten away with cutting block weight by 25% they would have done it and gone to a conventional thin wall short skirt casting and saved the weight and cost. And the long crank snout has nothing to do with it being OHC it has to do with being able to run the accessory belts on the modern non dished dampers. Even modern OVH engines sport this. The flat sealing surfaces is not by any means a mod thing and was taken from other engine manufactures primarily the Japanese and specifically motorcycles nor was Ford the first to put in to use on a auto engine. In the CV, GM, TC, Continental, MkVII, Mustang in the 90's the Mod's reliability record is something the that the Japanese and the German's envied it was with out a doubt the best most reliable most fuel efficient V8 on the market with out question. And I'll go to the mat with anyone on that. But the same can not be said about the mod in the trucks. The only Mod that has sat in the F Series and has not not had any major issues is the 6.2 but this engine was designed as a truck engine from the get go. We are no longer in the days of when an engineering designer sat down with a slide rule or even calculator and designed a piece of equipment manually doing load calculations. and added a factor of X to cover his potential over sights.. Now stuff is designed to X with the aid computers and double checked by the bean counters to get as close to X as possible with little to no margin for "non parameter events" We seen this this with the 6.0L an engine that served well in it's designed application but completely and literally fell apart when it was put in the F Series an application that common sense for most would dictate is less severe than in MD trucks and buses. In the final Year the 6.0L had become a reasonably decent motor in the SD. And was no worse than the 6.6 Duramax. it took Ford 10 years till the Mod in the F-Series was good enough that you did not have to worry about loosing head gaskets blowing plugs breaking plugs off, or having the bottom end go out.It was not till 08 when the mod in the F-Series truly became a 300K motor. with out having to worry A,B and C

Ya no kidding now you are lucky if you get a couple dozen now. Ford said it would be a new famaily of V8's and V6's RWD and FWD based on the Mod design sharing the combustion design and similar bore spacing's. Not the same but similar. Mod as launched was planned to primarily go down in Cubic inches not up. It was never planned to to use just one bore spacing But more than one. We did eventually get the large bore spacing mod as the 6.2, a mod with larger bore spacing. Read the article's a little closer Richard. It was intended to be family of engines based on a single architecture not single set of dimensions. It was not all shall be based on this. It was a design philosophy to share common design architecture between all engines. Allowing the mod to be modified as required for the intended applications but sharing as many components as possible. That is where you are getting hung up. Thinking it was all supposed to be this and this only and everything has to based of this alone. Do you think a 3.5LV8 would have shared the same bore spacing as a 4.6L V8 ? Had the same external dimensions? What be the point in even having a 3.5L V8 that took up the same space as a 4.6L and weighed more due to the increased amount of material in the block? The Modular engine was a design philosophy sharing as many parts as possible not a dimensional one.. All this got tossed out he window in the mid nineties when Ford when on the cheapening Any way you cut it the mods have been Ford's worst engines in the trucks period. The exception has been the 6.2L no mechanical issues at all not a one just a lack of bottom end torque. And the Mod bearing width is .758" eventually increased to .790" to combat scuffing Small block Ford's are .885"

The 91 TC was launched early 1990. Heck my 92 GM was built in Dec 1990. Ford announced the mods would be it the trucks in early 95 for the 97 MY IIRC Basically a full 5 years after launch.

Richard it is engineering and physics fundamentals. The larger the area of oil film bearing at a given pressure the higher the load/pressure it will handle before material contact. There are 2 ways in increase the load handling of an pressure oil film bearing. Either raise the lubricants pressure or increase the surface area. You are limited with in an internal combustion engine to the oil pressure you can run as the oil/ lubricant is not just a lubricant but also a coolant. When you increase pressure you reduce the period of time that the lubricant is in contact with the surfaces it needs to cool thus reducing the heat transfer to the coolant lubricant. You can not just arbitrarily increase the pressure to increase the load capability of the bearing. As you still have other systems relying on oil pressure such as cam chain tighteners and lifters and componant cooling. Additionally there is the load at start up and shut down. Having high pressure high load oil film bearings with small bearing surfaces that are not pressured before equipment start up and shut down such as in car engine leads to vastly accelerated bearing surface wear due to the high pressures when the materials are in contact with each other. Bearing load capability can be increased with larger diameter journals this increases the area under the load due to the larger diameter but this also increases rotating mass and in turn increases the load on the bearings., It is not near as effective as widening the bearing surface. The mods have narrow bearings due to the tight bore spacing. Ford revised the bearing material multiple times to be more scuff resistant. Scuffing is when the oil film is pushed out due to over loading and the bearing materials surfaces contact each other. This is why Ford went through umpteen rod and main bearings revisions to increase the resistance to scuffing and bearing wear.

They have already done it once with the 6.2. Redesigns for 3v heads to get more torque. And that is not even counting the multiple numerous design updates to fix deficiency's or the millions upon millions in warranty claims or the law suits for ejected plugs and broken stuck plugs.