[POWERSTROKE]

The Good and Bad part of this is these old engines were built and run most of their lives in the dark ages of understanding about what made engines live long lives. Detergent oil was just becoming common, oil and air filtration were just starting to be understood.

And just for the record, oil bath air cleaners barely deserve the name air cleaner. Good luck finding an oil bath air cleaner Mfg that will print a cleaning efficiency number, but 90-95% is as good as you will find. A dry pleated paper element is 99-99.5+%.. Full flow oil filtration makes all oil lubed parts last much longer. The old bypass systems always let dirty oil back into the oil pan.

With today's oil and filtration technology I bet these old V-6's would have all been half million to million mile engines. A lot of engineering went into making the engines survive both short cycle and extended cycle operation. The engineers did a great job of managing heat. And truck engines run HOT, you literally can melt them down. The night I got my mid-1970's IH Loadstar with 478 V-8 I ran my normal 375-400 mile route. Truck ran like poop at first then kept running better and better. It had sat for months on the dealers lot. About 100 miles into my first half of my run I pulled off the road and stopped and walked past the right front tire. The exhaust manifold was still glowing orange & red hot, even when I walked by it again a minute later it was still red hot.
That truck got about three miles per gallon, ran 60-62 mph, so that tiny 1/4 inch fuel line moved 20 gallons of gas per hour! The BIG V-6's burned gas just as fast, the 637 V-8 & 702 V-12 even faster. The cost of feeding that old Binder finally caught up with the little company.

For comparison, the Ford F-700 I drove before the Binder with the 8.2L Detroit Fuel Pincher got about 7-8 mpg of cheaper diesel fuel back in those days. The Binder carried 100 gallons of gas, so effective range was less than 300 mIles. Ford carried 40 gallons of fuel and range was 280-300 miles. But less than $40 to fill up the Ford vs over $100 to gas up the Binder. The 8.2L was a TERRIBLE engine, but it did stretch a Dollar worth of fuel a long ways.

The cost of operation would eventually catch up with gasoline truck engines but with the life span of these big V-6's they would stay on the road way beyond their expiration dates.