Powerstroke Trivia Question
Today I have a trivia question for you: What is the one part that is common in the 7.3, 6.0 and 6.4 engine?
The answer is: the lifter.
This lifter fits everything: 6.9 diesels (1983-1987); 7.3 (1988-2003), 6.0 and 6.4. This originally showed up in the GM 5.7 diesel (1978-1985). This part is pretty prolific out there in the world. This is the same part that is in my LS1 ski boat engine. I just recently had a mishap out in the lake where the boat got swamped and water got into the engine, and I just took this same part and put them into this engine. Suffice it to say that there have been 10s of billions of these little buggers made (8 in every V8 engine out there that GM has); and it is really a time proven, extremely sound component.
This part worked really well in the 7.3 because the 7.3 never saw a bunch of RPM. We started seeing problems with these components in the 6.0 and 6.4 because of the higher RPM and each lifter having to operate two valves. There is a lot of weight and valve flow. If the valves touch the pistons, this is the weak point and we kill these rollers.
One of the things that we do to make sure that this lifter works correctly in these trucks is to use premium lifters made in American not China. We source it from Comp Cams, Crane Cams, and all those guys. You pay a little more, but the failure is nil. Why shave a few bucks off on a Chinese part?
When Ford Motor Company designed the 6.7, an effort was made to overcome the shortcomings of the 6.0 and 6.4. They decided that it was time to retire this antiquated design from 1978. So the 6.7 has a much bigger, stronger lifter to overcome the shortcomings of the older design. They also put this funny little lifter thing inside that works really well. As a result, we have not seen one of these fail.
I got a chuckle out of the fact that this part had been developed in 1978 and used all the way up to 2010. Ford Motor Company made a wise choice in retiring this older antiquated design and going with this much nicer but much more expensive piece but we don’t see the failures that we saw with the old design.
The bottom line, Ford is making these machines better, longer lasting, and more dependable so that you as the owner, driver or operator of these vehicles don’t have to worry about trivial things like this lifter breaking. ~Bill Hewitt
