6.0L powerstroke possible replacement

[kustomizingkid]

And who defined that? Your local diesel shop or some Youtube expert?

O-rings don't belong in a work truck. If it's a toy go for it. If it needs to be reliable and repairable O-ringed heads are a very stupid investment.

The absolute stupidest approach is to O-ring the heads while still running the stock profile camshaft. If you do that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what's at work here.

And like was mentioned before several times, the surface finishes of the block and head deck surfaces are critical. The surface finishes they are made with do not work. They will fail even with studs. You have to pull the engine block out, surface the deck correctly. Correct surface finish does more for reliability than O-rings ever could.

Then there's the valvetrain stuff. Just in this thread there are several first hand accounts of 6.0 lifter failures from the plastic guides.

What RA is the correct surface finish? The stippled Mahle head gaskets are a gamechanger too...

 

[Garwood]

It's been proven time and again oringed heads are better at sealing compression be it Ford Chevy or cummins.

The issue with the pushrods on the 6.0 is they are too long. All replacements from Ford are the shorter 6.4 rods. The lifters didn't change between the 7.3, 6.0, and 6.4. It wasn't until the 6.7 that the lifter was redesigned. It's one of the few if only parts that interchange between the powerstrokes.

I agree that O-ringing the heads makes them seal better if by sealing better you mean handling more than stock boost levels for a moderate time frame, say, 100K miles, maybe more.

The issue I have with O-rings is when people do it as a bandaid without addressing the real issues and the headgaskets fail again a few years later only this time you have the added complexity of trying to surface warped heads with O-ring grooves in them.

You ever been there? Lots of people have. It's not a fun place to be.

Now, if you skip the O-rings, but fix all of the other shit, you have a reasonably solid setup. And, if it does need work, because the only 6.0 that's really truly bulletproof is probably the 200 HP ones used in the medium duty trucks and E-series chassis, you can surface the heads, slap a gasket in there and be back on the road.


The pushrods are a separate issue. The issues with lifters failing is the plastic lifter trays causing lifters to fail in a couple different ways.

The lifters are great, it's the plastic trays. Get that plastic shit out of there and the lifters never have a problem.

 

[Garwood]

What RA is the correct surface finish? The stippled Mahle head gaskets are a gamechanger too...

Same as Cummins or Duramax. I don't surface heads or blocks so I don't know without asking.

If you work on these engines just look at deck finish. You can't recreate that shit. I don't know how Navistar did it, but it is very rough. It looks like really rough machine scraping. A lot of mechanics use a scotchbrite wheel on a die grinder to clean the deck. You might not see the surface finish that way. Scrape the deck off with a razor blade or gasket scraper, carefully scuff it with some 120 sandpaper on a flat block and then go over the deck with a fine machine table stone and light oil. Then you will get a perfect visual of what the finish looks like. It will stick out like a sore thumb.

I think one of the real big issues with the 6.0/6.4 is that diesel shops have made a shitload of money off these things over the years and they have repair recipes they've come up with that usually don't involve removing the shortblock from the truck. They have an aversion to sending a block out for machining because of the time it adds and, if you come from a diesel repair background, in every single other application, you basically never, ever cut the block deck unless it's the last resort.

The 6.0/6.4 needs the block decked. They usually need the mainline done too.

So in short you end up with all these folks believing their 6.0 or 6.4 is fixed when it has O-ringed heads and studs when it really isn't much better off in the long term than it was stock if they didn't machine the block deck.

 

[Garwood]

This picture wasn't focused on the deck, but it's the best I have and it does show what I'm talking about a little bit. You can see the large scallops in the surface finish and if you see it in person, or if I had the camera setup to focus on the deck surface, you would see the irregularities in the factory finish.

 

[kustomizingkid]

I've done lots of diesel work... just curious if you could actually quote an RA.

 

[Garwood]

This is a 6.4 lifter tray and lifter with 110k miles on it. Old guy owned King Ranch with perfect maintenance.

 

[Garwood]

I've done lots of diesel work... just curious if you could actually quote an RA.

I will ask what my local shop uses.