Been a good little while since I've made any updates. In prep for the kit arrival I decided I needed to make some minor improvements to the workspace so I've painted the entire inside (walls and ceiling) of my garage white and added a bunch of LED work lights. Looks like an operating room now when it's all lit up, lol. Got a pack of 8 lights from amazon for $99. Can't complain about that.

With the garage all ready to go I moved back to working on the engine some more. There was a lot of carbon build up on the tops of the pistons and the intake tract was very wet with oil. I researched this a bunch, lived in denial for a good bit, then decided I should do something about this. Some things I found:

1. The F-150 motors are notorious oil consumers.
2. Ford has a TSB out there about it.
3. Sometimes it's just a bad PCV valve, but my research on this was not definitive.
4. If the Ford dealership tech follows the full TSB and the engine consumes more than a certain amount the customer gets a new long block .
5. Worst case scenario is I may have to replace the block, good news...replacement gen 3 blocks can be purchased from summit for around 850 and they often have them in stock (maybe that's a bad sign...meh, moving forward).

Decided I wanted to replace the piston rings with gapless ones from total seal. I talked to the guys at total seal and they reassured me I could replace the rings with no detriment since the gen 3 blocks have the sprayed in cylinder liners. So I pulled all the pistons tore them all apart and this is what things look like before and after the 1st round of cleaning:







The Rotel really helps cut through the carbon build up, lol. Seriously though, the can was just the perfect size!

The cleaning is going in phases with multiple soakings in the solvent, but the final looks pretty darn good. I have a couple more left to go, but I should have that knocked out this coming weekend. I'm still waiting on rings as I found out the dimensions for the gen 3 pistons are different than previous generations (not only in bore diameter). Ultimately what the guys at total seal and I came up with was to just send them one of my pistons and they will figure out the correct spec for the rings and package them all together for me. Then comes the fun task of ring filing and fitting the pistons back in the block. I'm actually looking forward to that process even though I know it will be tedious.

Last thing, I found that if you nag Ford Performance enough they sometimes give in to what you want . I was able to get all the Gen 3 engine build specs from them. If anyone is interested PM me and I can send you the file they gave me.

Cheers,
Patrick