Here's Why You Can't Kill An Old Ford F-Series Truck | Gunsmoke Ep.3

[Music] guys what you see here are two old Ford f-series trucks and in this video case who is behind the camera and I will show you why you cannot kill an old Ford truck [Music] if you guys have been watching careful classics for a while you recognize this truck this is project Gunsmoke and it's a 1989 Ford f-350 1 ton with a 7.3 liter diesel non-turbo under the hood and the manual trans this is our ongoing project which will be sold for charity so stay tuned to the end of the video will tell you our plan for this truck all right let's see what project Gunsmoke has in store oh yeah these days you guys are used to turbocharged diesels well this is not it this is a natural aspirated 7.3 liter diesel engine some heavy duty trucks go together like peanut butter and jelly right I would say so yeah and it's even better when you get to pair them with manuals yes and this is a 7.3 liter so if you hear 7.3 liter these days you might be thinking to a turbocharged diesels like mm era or a brand new Godzilla v8 we have the gas engine but this is not it this is based on an International Harvester motor right yeah and there was an earlier version of this motor which was a 6.9 then came this 7.3 and after this motor there was also a turbo version of this 7.3 which didn't really make a lot more peak power that turbo was claimed to be more for combating altitude yeah so it was apparently pretty choked in the exhaust and that's a big part of the reason that it didn't make a whole lot of extra power but there's a common theme between these two trucks right basically giant motors kind of over built yep and also not very high horsepower right this engine when new was rated around 185 horsepower and around 338 pounds feet of torque but today's standards that's not a lot but by truck that's 31 years old and still runs almost like new that's saying something well especially if you want a motor like this to go for as long as it has a big part of that is it be under stress there's no boost going into it it's not seeing a whole lot of stress again so that's a big part of the reason that it can run for so long this whole truck is essentially a tractor a street-legal tractor absolutely the kind of rights like what do absolutely hopefully we'll be able to fix that you know this particular transmission is a VF v 4 - it's a five-speed although it drives more like a four-speed because you start out in second grimmy gear yeah any gear yeah which is not something that you would use really when you're normally drive unless you're pulling stumps or something yeah or if you need to go up a pretty vertical hill yes then it comes in handy otherwise not a whole lot to do but once again the clutch is relatively easy there I mean you would think it'd be like a dump truck you know driving one of those heavy big transmissions but no it's not the case so it's pretty nice it's great and it does have honestly a good amount of torque and over here is a truck that we initially purchased as a donor truck to fix project Gunsmoke but it turned out to be very very cool it's a 1990 f-150 with a straight-6 gas engine a 4.9 and also four-speed automatic behind it well let's open the hood and actually discuss what makes these trucks very special you know one sign of a real good indestructible truck its how heavy the hood is and in this case it just brings it a little bit tight oh yeah here there's the 4.9 litre straight-six case let's just discuss for a moment what this engine is all about a heart of any good truck is the engine right absolutely so what are we have under here so this is the 4.9 liter or 300 cubic inch inline 6 that Ford made from roundabouts if I remember right 1965 to 1996 so 31 years in production it was based on a 240 cubic inch motor and this was the version of that motor that was basically used in truck application and not just for Ford's a lot of these engines actually ended up in heavy-duty vehicles like some dump trucks and even a lot of UPS trucks and a lot of those motors had a high flow exhaust manifold which is very desirable for people who are wanting to get a little bit more out of some of these motors yeah and this is the latest electronic fuel injection version of it yep and like you said 31 years is a long time for any engine to be pretty very long time and the power rating varied right but this latest version was around 150 horsepower would have been around 150 horsepower and 280 is foot pounds of torque yeah that's really good torque yeah and especially because most that torque comes on around about 1600 rpm so one of the reason that these were good for commercial applications is that you would get all of that torque so low yeah and what about the transmission so the transmission that this truck is optioned with is the e4od transmission which is actually one of the more heavy-duty options for this for this truck setup and so it looks like this truck was option to actually do some work yeah and the that basically means it's a four-speed automatic yep right and overdrive so the third gear is basically one-to-one ratio and there's an overdrive for a little bit more efficiency at higher speeds when I drop this truck now it just wants to run right like put it and just drive and it's just surf to take off and it definitely doesn't want to stop once again so there's a story one of the viewers commented weaith on the last video we did with this truck they said though at the cash for clunkers program that was about what twelve or fourteen years ago they were trying to turn in some of these trucks and destroy these engines and they couldn't yes some people have stories that when some of these motors were brought in to the cash for clunkers program what they would do for a lot of the running vehicles that were brought into them was they would put sand in the motor so that it would die and most vehicles would die after just a couple minutes idling some people have stories of these things running for so long with sand in them that eventually they stopped even trying to kill them because it just wasn't worth the time yeah so we bought this truck we didn't quite realize what the engine it had because we wanted just a solid body absolutely that's on this truck but turns out it's one of the kind of gem of a truck turns out that this is actually a pretty desirable motor a lot of people really really like these things and it makes sense it's a cast iron block it the compression is between depending on the model year between eight and nine to one so it's low compression cam and block and it's gear driven instead of chain or belt driven two valves per cylinder pushrod motor so nothing about this motor is very heavily stressed and that's big part of the reason that they just go forever very cool very cool these days most manufacturers share for example the cab structures between half-ton full-size trucks and heavy-duty trucks here we have an f-150 and when you compare this truck against the f-350 heavy-duty truck the Gunsmoke most of the body panels the bed the fenders the hood are interchangeable they're identical so it's time moved on trucks started to differentiate themselves a little bit more but back in this era the body panels were the same and having interchangeable parts is good for manufacturing it's a little bit cheaper to buy better to maintain you can find spare parts and that's how we found this truck we paid about $900 for this 1990 f150 just because it has solid rust free body so the theme of these trucks is being simple like we said and part of that is body-on-frame construction nothing too complicated know crazy panels that are interconnected in all kinds of crazy ways this is simple and easy to fix and underneath that frame we've got nice stout Dana 60 axles which is one of the biggest things that we're excited about with this truck because those are great axles and solid axles like this are super tough you can off-road them hard and they'll they'll hold up now one way that you can tell that our f150 six-shooter here isn't quite as stout as the f-350 is by the fact that these are five lugs and our f-350 has an eighth love so obviously more stout Axl's over there but the running gear on this truck is still pretty impressive it's rear-wheel drive so it's probably not going to be much of a crawler but this twin i-beam front suspension is a design that a lot of people love to modify for desert racing apparently it's pretty easy to make these a good solid strong long travel suspension setup it's not as nice as a arm suspension for driving on road but it still handles pretty well off-road for a lot of people who want to take a truck like this and make a budget off roader back in the day before push-button starts and remote opens and hands-free there were two keys this round one to unlock the door and the square one to actually start the truck and this is not just for that it was kind of many different manufacturers did very similar things and let's start fire this puppy up this is the f-150 it still likes to bus though a truck that was worth about $900 starts right up like it's brand-new and the idol is okay there is no rev counter here on this gauge cluster but why do you Ref just put it in gear you can kind of feel where than when it is gauges and just go [Music] once again simplicity is key a very basic steering column the hazard switch for the hazard lights is actually on the column it's kind of a little guy so that's something that's been improved since then because this is kind of hard to find a very proper column mounted shifter that's what I love because it feels manly and good and this is a four-speed like we said here's an overdrive lock out so if you don't need it kind of push this button this has an aftermarket stereo Sony but this is pretty standard AC controls heating controls although this truck no longer has AC somebody removed it both these trucks have a dual tank setup for fuel you have a gauge you have I'll show you that a little bit later you have also switched between front tank and rear tank just basic oil pressure which when Tommy and case bought this truck we didn't have any oil pressure coolant and battery very simple speed that the commoner was an option so you could get different configurations of your gauge cluster but this is more of a base truck it's a custom XLT so that's what you get here's where you can switch between front and rear fuel tanks you get decent range although we haven't tested fuel economy on these trucks right here you have windshield wipers and wash and here the lights control very very simple you have a foot emergency brake brake release but not everything is perfect look at the travel on this brake pedal whoa it's about a mile away so and we fixed this on Gunsmoke already do we have to fix it again we might see maybe Tommy and I can bleed the brakes and that'll help who knows this worth shot as far as we understand this trucks turned out in Maryland but spent a lot of its life in California around San Diego area but this is why we purchased it no this is not why okay we purchased it because of how solid everything else look at this bed this truck is 30 years old and it just barely has a few scratches it's just tough eight foot bed you can turn this into an Overland rig you can put a matches back here a couple of cabinets it already has a topper I mean how cool is this and it could go probably another 30 years with no issue like you can see we've got a pretty similar setup and the interior of Gunsmoke similar to the f-150 got the same two keys one to unlock it and one to actually start it and when you start this like with any diesel truck you need a weight so the glow plugs get going all that some litter pleasant sounds and then you fire up the beastly 7.3 liter naturally aspirated diesel and did why did we call it Gunsmoke well one because it's got a gun rack and two because it throws out a lot of smoke yeah we're not saying these trucks are perfect one example this oil leak that's coming from Gunsmoke all we're saying is these trucks are very durable they're built solidly and they're very simple that's why you cannot kill them dude the whole thing just rocks when you touch the throttle it's a lot of motor not a lot of power but a lot of displacement and the nice thing about this truck especially with it being manual is that we actually do have a tech so we can see what we're revving up to besides that pretty similar to the other setup we've got how much voltage that we're getting out of battery we've got our coolant temp we've got the gauge for both of our tanks so what's happening with our tanks through the duals yes so the rear tank is leaking and so we had it drained we can either pull one of the tanks from the f-150 although from the research that I've done I don't think that the sender for that would work with this truck but Dan Atkinson a good friend of ours has a tank that we might be able to throw in here and I think that would be worthwhile yeah and basically we kind of just closed that off for now exactly right and we're running on one tank for now we've just made sure that it's not leaking so that we can get this thing running properly operating in a way that's gonna be safe me and while doing as much cosmetic stuff as we can and working out the details of everything mechanical that this thing is going to need this f-350 has very similar switches to what are in the f-150 and the nice thing about them is that again they're very very simple so it's not something that's prone to breaking they're not sophisticated not complicated and if they do break they wouldn't be hard to fix listen to that that's a real old-school buzzer sound a lot of the cars from this era had these annoying buzzing noises so it's period-correct and it's cool to see and another even cooler feature that's less annoying from back in this era are these smoker windows modern cars don't have these but this was a great way to get some fresh air without having to have it blow directly on you this let in some fresh air without it blowing directly on you it was a really really nice thing to have and I don't know why modern cars don't have it anymore and guys this is what I really like this appears to be an original radio just bass control very simple once again simplicity nothing complicated and yes you do still have your ashtray down here or charger port yeah but no use bees right no way and no need for it yeah absolutely this is an old truck it's it's good without it all you need is the CB radio right here 10-4 good buddy ten-four and there here's the five speed again in terms of actual driving it's more of a four speed because first is only something that you're gonna use in situations where you need a lot of gearing but just good to have a manual those throws are amazingly long but cool yeah and compared to a lot of off-roaders not too bad a lot of these old off rotors have pretty long throws yeah talked about for low manly of course this four-wheel-drive truck has a manual apparated hub for locking and unlocking the front hubs for four-wheel drive once again simple but you do have to get out of the truck to enable four-wheel drive or go back to two-wheel indestructable right well tell that to this bed that's another story but I want to point out one more thing this one-ton gunsmoke truck has fully floating axles unlike that f-150 and that also means that it's more durable so the way that the bearings are set up inside this hub just basically last longer and carries more weight gross vehicle weight on this truck is about 9,000 pounds and then on the f-150 six thousand two hundred fifty pounds so these trucks can still carry a lot of payload when these trucks were brand-new they were relatively affordable these prices are not exact but in 1989 an f-150 like this started around twelve to thirteen thousand bucks f-350 one ton heavy-duty truck like this start you're closer around 15,000 and with a few options of course you can lift those prices up a little bit but once again simplicity value and longevity as you see with these two trucks let us know what you think in the comments section below and of course go back to tearful truck comm where we have all the information about these trucks and you can also learn exactly when we're going to be either auctioning off this truck for charity or obviously selling it for charity thank you very much and thanks guys

Channel: TFLclassics

Views: 417,971

Rating: 4.8631625 out of 5

Keywords: Ford, F150, F350, F-150 review, F-350 Review, full size vs heavy duty, diesel review, what is the best diesel truck, old vs new, manual pickup, 4x4 truck, drive, driven, review, reviewed, classic truck review, ford restoration, F-150 restoration, test, tested, old vs new truck, TFLtruck, The Fast Lane Truck

Id: 9vOifldN4fw

Length: 19min 27sec (1167 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020