I get that there is a marginal benefit of the football head rods/bolts over the passenger car square cuts.
I also have found that the D6TE-AA rods are footballers.
Other than pulling the oil pan, what did my block come with? It's a D1 block that came factory in a 77 F-150. Build date for truck is 01/77. Assembly date for the block is tooling stamped 7A12 (Jan 12 1977) next to front cover under the pass side head.
Would this have the D6TE-AA rods, or were those only for the higher duty truck engines?

 

I'm not sure if the straight cut seat rods were ever used in a pickup truck engine. They might have been but the ones that I've seen from the late 70's onward have the football headed bolts. Some time in the 90's the rods change again to the ones with the balance pads on the top of the small end instead of the side.

Really the way the rods are machined makes no real difference in actual use. The rods when they break generally break in the beam a couple of inches up from the big end and not through the big end itself. What to look for in these rods are forgings that are well centered and the bored holes aren't way out of whack with the forging. These rods are stronger than they look and any of them will work well for most applications.

 

Thanks Dave for the reply and info.
regarding big end, do you put the rod bolts in the big end bucket? I was planning on using some ARP football head bolts just for a little extra insurance.
I've not done forensics on many 460s to see what and why they break, so I appreciate the insight.
I did have one 35 years ago in a '73 colony park that kept losing piston skirts, and it never got raped that I know of--but I suspect it had D2VE heads and may have been a detonation victim. That was a long time ago and I don't remember what rods it had.

 

Broken pistons skirts was a but of a problem on the 460 but not as bad as in the 302 or 351w of that era.

The ARP bolts are not a bad idea and they will work in ether style of rod. With that said, the stock bolts are fine for most applications and if they have not been corroded or greatly overstressed in their lifetime they're probably ok.

Over time it has been pretty much determined that the differences in the rod machining really didn't matter in any build that they would really be practical to use. As an example my customer who used to run two monster trucks started out doing 4x4 mud bog stuff. I built a really low buck 460 to get him going figuring on building a larger engine later. That engine used a KB137 piston, Dove C heads, a flat tappet cam, stock straight cut rods with ARP bolts, stock crank and a stock pan modified for more capacity. Stock CJ style oil pump. It got turned to 6600rpm a lot. I know more than 100 mud runs and it never missed a beat. I never had to replace the rod bearings. I think that's leaning on them about as hard as is realistic with rpm, a pretty heavy piston and the engine probably made close to 500 horsepower. There was video of his wife driving at a mud bog where the shift light is on for over a minute at wide open throttle.

The 429 and 460 engine is a really good design overall with only a few weak areas; If you're drag racing and there's any tire shake the oil pump can break off of the engine. . The single bolt and single dowel pin setup at the front of the cam is a weak area with a solid roller. Anything else and it is fine. The fix is to make it use a 7/16 bolt and two dowel pins. This isn't really ever a problem in the small block engines which is weird because they are basically the same.

 

wow, great info, thanks!
THis makes me feel a lot more comfortable since I don't expect to turn more than 6000. Of course as it sits, the engine is valve spring limited on rpm. So, once I expand that envelope, and the engine can be made to spin over 5500, I gotta figure out what needs attention.
wheel hop is indeed an issue with the truck, and while I don't plan to beat the snot out of it, appreciate the tip on the oil pump. I suppose that's why Kaase has one with a much thicker mounting flange?

 

Back when he was developing his oil pump Jon Kaase asked me if I had ever had problems with the pumps breaking off in the wet sump monster truck engines. I told him that it had never happened which he thought was surprising with all of that jumping around and stuff. On those I had a gusset that went from the pump to a hole in the middle of the front main cap(SVO block) which probably helped. The other truck was always a dry sump.

My friend Wes broke several in his drag racing truck before he went with a Kaase pump.

Here it is running 5.70's in the 1/8th. It broke the pump on a pass which ended our day. No damage done to the engine.


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