so today my dad was doing something at the fire department building. when I got off of school me and my brother went over there. to kill the time we started looking at all the old/older fire trucks. one of them seems to be a 1980 F800. when I finally got the hood open it bounced out at me. right on the air cleaner it said "429 4V".......mated to a 5 speed. I also checked the valve cover to make sure. I looked at how many miles were on the truck......4521.8. dad said the engine doesn't run too good, but I thought it sure would be nice for the FD to sell the truck to me, I'd rebuilt the engine/carb/trans, and put it in my truck. great looking interior since it hasn't been used barely any.

another one was I think about a 1959 F6. it had some kind of flathead 6 in it. I couldn't find any tags on the door or the engine so there's no tellin'.

the last Ford was a 1981/1982 F350 with a diesel (I'm guessing 6.9) and a 4 speed. that one had a bunch of miles though.

I had to laugh at all these truck, too. since they're used so little they all still have biased tread tires on them.

the main point of this post is I WANT TO GET THE 429 AND PUT IT IN MY TRUCK, BUT DAD SURE WOULDN'T LIKE 6-8 MPGS.

 

It's just MONEY!!!! lol

 

Be carefull with the "heavy duty" (not sure that that is the correct term) 385 series engines, I hear that parts are hard to come by. They're not your typical 429-460 engines.

 

yeah, that's all it comes down to is money.

EDIT- what do you mean by that unrulee?

 

Just give it a tune up and run it. With such low milage there's no need to go any farther. I was a volunteer fireman for 10 years and if your FD is anything like ours that truck has had more oil changes than yours.

 

we had a 2 ton truck like that. come to find out it was a 370 lima. its a destroked 429 so it dont rev as high but its got all kinds of ***** at low rpm.

 

It sounds like it would be a damned good low mileage engine to me, most of the time a fire truck goes less than 20 miles at a time even if it's a rural truck, right?

 

You could just buy the whole fire truck, rebuild it, take off all the weighty items and have a Very unique ride

 

Those medium duty 429s have a larger crankshaft snout than a car or truck 429/460, it can be turned down though and it is a steel crank. I think they have a different timing cover which can be swapped for a different one. You could get the whole truck and make it run well as is, those are good engines in a medium duty truck.

 

yeah, I can believe that truck has had more oil changes than mine. they don't run that thing a lot either so that would probably be the main thing.

this truck I'm not sure of the main thing they did with it. now they basically put it in parades and stuff. get's ran like 2-3 times a year. actually this truck was probably never driven more than 20 miles at a time except for when they drove it home from the dealership.

if I bought the whole truck I would take that engine out of since it has so little of miles on it, get a different engine for it, and then put that 429 in my truck.

 

The wear in such engines comes from thermal cycling (aka: cold starts). FD engines don't get the benefit of either (a) pre-use warm-up to recommended operating temperature or (b) sustained operation at recommended operating temperature prior to shutdown.

I've got over 560,000 miles on a 4.3-liter Chevy V6 (1992 Astro, VIN Z) that still runs like new. It's probably going to start needing some minor repairs, because it doesn't get the frequent and regular use it originally did (over 516k miles before the end of the first 48 months).

The reason so many miles racked up so easily is twofold: (1) for 168 hours each week, the engine was near operating temperature -- and by that, I mean simply that it didn't have a chance to cool down all the way before it was being driven again; and (2) oil changes every 3,000 miles, regardless.

Treat any engine like that (clean fuel is important, too, but you get the idea), and it will last a ridiculously long time. Oh, one more thing: used properly, an automatic transmission greatly reduces the likelihood of encountering problems arising from driveline shock.