My ironman shortblock

There seems to be alot of people on here asking about the durability of a stock 5 liter block. Thought I'd share my experiences from this past weekend.

My Dad has been a mechanic for 30 years now and is helping me with my head/cam swap. I was a little leary at first to do this since I have 163,000 miles on my stock shortblock, but its running great and I'm not using any oil so I took my chances. Well, when we tore the engine apart my Dad couldn't believe it, you could see the cross hatchings on every cylinder wall! Timing chain wasn't even stretched out, it looked like a slightly used engine. Combustion burn in the chambers and pistons looked even on every cylinder. This was even with running lean for a couple weeks. I plan on testing the spring pressure this weekend to see how the heads held up. Now I'm sure this isn't true for everyones high mileage block, maybe I'm just lucky

My Dad worked on alot of State Trooper cars during the late 80's and early 90's that had almost 300,000 miles with the stock 5 Liter shortblock.

Here's another story about the mod motors. My Dad worked on a 180,000 mile Crown Vic with the 4.6 that had a broken piston. Two Ford engineers called him up and told him not too touch the car. They flew down the next day, pulled the whole engine out, sent it to Detroit and gave him a brand new engine. They had never heard of that happening on the Crown Vic's so they wanted to see what went wrong.