Bought my total stock 1950, 3604 truck in September 2005 and over the next few year
put about 8,000 miles of trouble free fair weather driving on it. The bad part was that she
used a LOT of oil during those 8,000 miles. My compression was right up there and ya
couldn’t see it smokin’ out the tail pipe, well, maybe at night in the headlights of the cars
behind ya you could see a little haze, but there wasn’t any noticeable smoke in the day
light and cleaning the plugs every 1,000 miles or so kept her running sweet as honey. See
when I say she used a LOT of oil I mean 1 quart every hunert or hunert-n-fifty miles.
Heck, my joy riding was costing me more for Rotella-T than it was for the petrol I was
burning. The fact was that I was getting an oil change every five or six hundred miles, but
I did do a real drain at about 1K just to flush out any of the black stuff, which made the
fresh earl look like India ink after a couple hundred miles.
Back in the fall of 2009 I decided to put the new front bumper on, which I’d bought the
first year that Bluebelle and I had meet. Well a new front bumper warranted nice fresh
looking brackets so they came off. The gravel pan was already in a position for renewal
residing between the two and while I was at it the grill could use a little sprucing up and
on it went till the whole front clip was scattered about the garage. This offered easy
access to the steering gear and at long last the Engine and transmission so now was the
time to end the oil consumption that had been eating away at me for the past four
years.
Checking the bore revealed a slight ridge and about .006“-.008” cylinder wear from the
62,000 miles of faithful service she‘s performed over the past six decades. A month or so
at the machine shop had the engine back home for assembly. Another year of
procrastination went buy getting all the body parts, steering gear, and transmission back
in shape. But it all came together this fall and in October I started giving her some road
time. We just finished up with the Christmas bit and so far I’ve managed to put a little
over 2,000 miles on the old gal. Changed the break-in oil at 500 miles, clear as a drop of
dew and I’m now at about 1.500 miles on this charge of oil and it’s the same, clean as a
whistle and that‘s with out any filter mind you!. And what I really like, the line on the
dip-stick has hardly moved in all that time.
So I’m forecasting the color of oil for 2012 to be, all clear.
Signed,
One happy camper,
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
Last edited by Denny Graham; 12/27/2011 2:40 PM.
