mabynack wrote:
I would stay away from it. I own a 2005 6.0 and it has less than 130,000 on it. Three years ago it blew a head gasket and I had it bulletproofed. The whole thing cost me $8600. Last year one of the cam followers came apart and I had to have a lot of the work redone when the parts from the follower scattered throughout the engine. That was another $7000. It's had two fuel injection control modules at over 800 a piece. Two injectors at 770 per injector. The turbo had to be cleaned after less than 100,000 miles and that cost me 1200. The front brakes kept locking up when I was driving down the road and that ended up costing me 2600. I don't even tow with it that much. I mostly use it to go back and forth to work, about 30 miles a day.
I've been a die-hard Ford guy for 40 years and this truck has convinced me to look at other manufacturers for my next vehicle. Not only is the engine a piece of junk, the dealer didn't treat me very well when I tried to get it repaired. They made me pay for a FICM when the truck had 78000 miles on it. It should have been a warrantee item. I took it in several times for overheating and stalling and they replaced the coolant tank cap and charged me 110. As soon as the warrantee was up they told me the problem was a blown head gasket and wanted me to pay them $5000 for it. The head gasket was a known problem with this model and can be easily diagnosed by checking for exhaust gases in the coolant. They choose to save the company some money and alienate a lifetime customer.
Yikes and sorry to hear of your troubles. It is not pleasant to be broken down any time, and I was always worried about that when we had our 6.0L. It made for a lot of stressful trips and we actually shied away from some longer trips because of it. I really loved the Super Duty truck but the engine was a boat anchor. It was also extremely gutless below 2k RPM with the 6 speed manual transmission.
As I said earlier, the 6.0L has some inherent design flaws that "bulletproofing" cannot correct. An example of this is insufficient head bolts per cylinder which make them prone to head gasket failure or head warping no matter what is done including installing aftermarket head studs.
The fact that there are more of them on the road than any other truck of the era is interesting but means nothing. Ford has always sold more HD trucks than the other 2. And between experience with my 6.0L and more than a dozen of them at the City I work at, I guarantee that most of the 6.0L trucks on the road today have had a boat load of money sank into them to keep them running. As I said earlier, Ford did not spend $1b plus on this engine in warranty repairs because it was a good engine.
