Do yourself a favor and buy the rod and main bearings, an oil pump, and a pan gasket. If you buy a pan gasket for a 92, it will be one piece rubber and won't ever leak again. Just grind the raised areas around the pan's bolt holes and it'll fit perfect.

If you don't install main and rod bearings, you'll probably waste your time and money buying and installing an oil pump.

 

I think that is going to be the plan.
Is anyone else running lucas and if so is it worth the extra money?

 

The common opinion is that the most half-assed repair you can do is to drop the pan and swap out the oil pump for a high volume one. You've already done the hard part by getting the pan out of the way, only to put in a band-aid rather than actually fix the problem that's very accessible at this point.
New bearings and stock oil pump is the way to go. I have destroyed cams with high volume pumps before, they put a major load on the drive gear.

 

This is a very true statement for the 5.0 V8. The kit car forum I frequent has many posts about the HV pumps destroying the cam gear. You could do a Goggle search and I'm sure you would come up with some info.

My experience was a stock 80's 302 I put a cam and HV pump in. My son and I changed the oil and put a can of CD2 in also. I did not run it to warm it up and mix the oil and CD2 which is thicker than honey, especially when cold. The next morning it was a very crisp MI fall day. I cranked it up and heard a squeal like a fan belt and thought nothing of it. I hopped on the highway and in just a short bit of time I saw a bunch of smoke in the rear view mirror. Just about that time it rattled and the engine light came on and it stopped running. It split the filter and dumped most of the oil in the driveway. I believe it picked up a slug of the CD2 and tried to shove it through the filter.

The 300/4.9's have a very adequate oil system as do the 302/5.0's. The general consensus is the HV pump is not necessary.

Jim

 

You might as well pull the engine out because your rear main seal is hard now from age and when you put in new bearings, it is going to leak like crazy (ask me how I know). So you gotta pull the trans to replace the rear main seal. After all that, it will be easier to yank the engine to begin with. This happened to me when I did rods and mains on my Bronco (302) many years ago. After I got it back together, the rear main leaked really bad and I thought, duh, how did I not know that was going to happen? So then I had to yank the trans to replace that seal. If I had known ahead of time that was going to happen, then it would have been faster and easier just to pull the motor to begin with.

Now, if you just do not want to do that, you can jack up the motor (be sure to remove your fan first so you don't break the shroud) and put little 2x4 blocks between the motor mounts and the frame and do it that way, but don't replace the main bearings, only replace the rod bearings. This will prevent the big leak at the rear main seal I was talking about. But I would then recommend you go with the high volume oil pump because IMO your bearings are shot and you will need the extra flow to make up for that.

 

Thanks everyone for all the input. I think I'm going to just go with some 20w50 and some lucas for now to get me by (not my daily driver). I can get a complete rebuild kit for around 350 bucks and my labor is always cheap. ) I like the truck and will plan on doing it before winter. Sounds like a good Fall project.

 

It's been nearly a decade since this question regarding low oil pressure was first posed, and I wish to add my experience with this exact problem -- namely, oil pressure that was okay at startup but dropped to 2-3 lbs at idle when hot, as measured by a plumbing gauge screwed into the spare oil-galley port on the lower left of the block. When the engine was revved, oil pressure wouldn't climb above 15 psi (this was on an '83 F-100 with a 4.9 and 200-300k+ miles).

I knew this oiling situation would eventually lead to major problems, thus I undid the motor mounts and jacked up the engine a few inches and dropped the oil pan. I discovered a lot of worn rod & main bearings -- but especially, a very badly worn oil pump, where there was clearance well in excess of 1/32" (>0.031") between the pump's internal lobes.

Thus I replaced the rod & main bearings, the oil pump & screen with stock components, then buttoned the whole thing up with a new stock gasket; I did all of this work on a busy urban street in front of my apartment (i.e. Broadway in Cambridge, Mass). That was over three years ago and since then the truck has run well, with a full 40 lbs of oil pressure throughout the engine's range of operation.

I wish to note that this vehicle came from the Florida coast and had no air filter installed, nor any crankcase breather filter, when I first acquired it. Fortunately, the rings and valves didn't suffer too badly from this neglect (compression is good in all cylinders) but airborne sand likely got sucked into the crankcase through the PCV system and over time, this sand destroyed the oil pump, as the pump sucks directly from the sump before any filtering. I should also note the engine was quite sludged-up initially, but a couple of oil changes with high-mileage formulations solved that issue quite effectively.