Hi I have a 01 f150 with 285,000 miles. Original motor and auto tranny. 5.4 engine with an SCT chip, shorty headers, super44 flowmaster dual exhaust, and a K&N cold air kit. On a 4" lift. On 22" wheels. And 305/44/r22 off-road nittos. Truck means a lot to me I want to upgrade it instead of buy a new truck. I'd like a better engine, 4x4 conversion and a 6 speed manual tranny. I've been told too many times that's ridiculous but it's worth it to me. Any suggestions?! I was thinking big block motor. Or a coyote, Allison tranny type of thing. Willing to spend $20k Max

 

V10 with a blower and all the running gear from an F250

 

OoO, my kind of party! Sounds like a fun headache. I've grown fond of both the FEs and the 385s. Lots of options with both, excessive amounts of power. Even modest upgrades with stock cast iron heads can come in well under a few thousand dollars for the DIYer, saving some dough for the entire rest of the drivetrain, brake, and suspension upgrades to follow.

Go beefy on the bottom end, get the machining out of the way as far as oiling mods and decking, stock crank, mildly ported iron heads, lightly upgraded valvetrain, aluminum intake, ceramic coated headers, and call it good till the rest of the truck is finished. Then if there's more money to burn, reapproach the top end to really kill it. Point being, the "rest" of the upgrades required to support a badass motor stack up fast in terms of cost. A full roller C6 with stage-2 shift gets close to $3k before opening the box. Then the rear end and traction devices, and so on.

I can't say I know too much about it, other than I'm doing a similar thing to mine. Because that's the way I want it, dammit. $20k does not seem undoable with tons of research and some bloody knuckles, but is not hard at all to blow that number way up.

The best advice I can think of is to find a good hole in the wall shop that deals in hot rods and big blocks. This forum is great for ideas and direction on radical upgrades, it is also subjective. I recommend final decisions be made with advice from the guy that will be doing the machining that you can interview with eye-to-eye to get exactly what you want out of the whole package. It may be the hardest and most important part of the build to keep expensive foibles at bay cuz some guy on the internet said it would work great.

Let us know how it goes!