I drained the plain-green out of my truck yesterday.

Stupid radiator didn't have a drain at the bottom; it's on the side of the rear bottom, and there's pretty much no way to not take a coolant bath once you take the plug out.

Also drained both sides of the block. Same deal, coolant bath ...

Left all three plugs out and did a backflush with just water. I didn't bother using flush chemicals because they were out at the local Wally World. Maybe I'll do that next time. The only serious rust was in the water pump pipe, and I scraped out a much as I could with a wrench.

Filled it back up with Zerex G-05. Would have been Fleet Charge, but the local Tractor Supply refuses to stock more than two gallons and they don't honor the price they have on their Web site ... so I went with Zerex, which has SCAs too. By the way, you can get it from Zoro Tools for $16 a gallon online.

Having a flush tee in your heater line makes refilling the coolant much easier. It pretty much eliminates getting air in the top of your heater core as long as you leave the tee open as you pour coolant in. If you prop it up so it's the highest point in the system, the air will just bleed from there.

I also took the opportunity to replace the upper and lower radiator hoses, which appeared to be original (?) ... at least, they said Motorcraft on them. The lower hose wasn't in very good shape. I replaced them both with Dayco hoses.

That was the hardest part of the job. The hose clamps that (I guess) came stock are really hard to work with. I used a huge pair of channel lock pliers to compress the clamp, but even at its most compressed it's still really tight. I had a slight leak on the lower hose after starting up the truck, but it stopped once I repositioned the clamp. I might also put a standard hose clamp on there; I'm going to wait and see if the leak recurs.

No idea if the truck had any SCAs in it; I didn't bother testing. But I have no blowby at all (!) in spite of high miles, so I'm assuming the engine's really in pretty good shape.

Oh, and unrelated, but interesting nonetheless. I noticed a hose that runs between two fittings at the bottom of my radiator, just from one to the other. Turns out that allows the radiator to be used as a transmission cooler if you want (I guess that's the stock mode). Mine has been bypassed and the truck has an aftermarket transmission cooler. So that's good news; means that probably the PO took decent care of the transmission. Which, with an E4OD, is a *really* good thing.