Just bought a 94 F-350 Crew Cab, Long Bed, with a 7.3L Turbo IDI. Less than 60k miles.

Got it for less than a $1000 since the owners (local company) had blown the engine. They rebuilt the tranny 2 weeks before blowing the engine so essentially a new tranny. They are a recycling yard and all their heavy equipment is diesel so they treated the truck like any other diesel, no additives, no special care and ended up with a dead engine.

Replacement engine is being installed this week along with a new radiator. (They had pulled and lost the radiator since they were going to replace the IDI with a gasser before finding out it was too major of a job.)

So for less than half the cost of a used one I get a good truck.

I'm a woodworker so I need to haul lots of lumber and I mill a lot of my own lumber so I have to haul large logs as well. Kind of hard to haul a 1 ton log in a 12 year old Dodge Caravan. Lost an old growth 10ft, 36in Oak log last month because I had no way to move it.

Would have preferred a Dodge Diesel, but at the price it was too good to pass up.

Except for a lot of bed dings it's in great condition. Still Shiny.

Only problem with it is its Black and we live in Birmingham Alabama.

 

Good luck take care of it and it will treat you well I had good service from several of the old ford diesels.

 

Good luck with the new acquisition!<br><br>And if you get fed up with the IDI you can look into repowering it.<br><br> ;D<br><br>AlpineRAM

 

Repowering wouldn't be bad.<br><br>But as nice is the truck is, and it's nice to be driving a man's truck for a change, for me it's a &quot;shop tool&quot; so to speak. I spend most of my time in the shop manufacturing prodigious quantities of sawdust and shavings (which are nice for starting the wood stove). As long as she gets my lumber from the yard to my lumber rack and as long as she will drag logs into the bed and then dump them by my mill, I'll be a happy camper. And she'll sound nice doing it.<br><br>I suppose it's heresy to say that I appreciate all the fine looking trucks all you folks have built and modified, but I'm an old country boy and the Beast is somewhere between my bandsaw and my lathe in my heart.<br><br>

 

Fitzwaryn, I do understand you perfectly. For quite a long time I was working in a race car company. The love for good tools that get the job done.... <br>I didn't bomb my RAM too much. ( yet )<br>A freind of mine has an F350 IDI, and he is quite content. The only real downside on his is that it's 4x2 and not too much fun in the snow. <br><br>AlpineRAM

 

Snow???<br><br>Oh yea, that white stuff you see in the pictures of Yankeeland. Glad I live in the South where we don't allow that stuff.<br><br>Know why I live in the South? Because I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska. Left there in 1970 and I'm still trying to warm up.<br><br>Of course I say that and in 1992 we had a blizzard that dumped 3 feet of snow on the city. The entire area panicked! Had to get a National Guard Engineer unit to clear the roads. Snowplows are NOT standard city equipment here. Garrison Keilor and his folks were doing a Prairie Home Companion show here and got snowed in for a week

 

Snow.... yep the white crap most drivers would just like to hold a match to it and let the wind blow away the ashes ;D<br><br>But maybe your US Boys would have no competition in downhill skiing if we handn't at least some of the stuff <br>I read about Fairbanks. Temperatures well below the legal minimum if somebody could be so reasonable to set up laws against them .<br><br>AlpineRAM

 

[quote author=Fitzwaryn link=board=8;threadid=9226;start=0#88542 date=1041784338]<br>Just bought a 94 F-350 Crew Cab, Long Bed, with a 7.3L Turbo IDI. Less than 60k miles.<br><br>Got it for less than a $1000 since the owners (local company) had blown the engine. They rebuilt the tranny 2 weeks before blowing the engine so essentially a new tranny. They are a recycling yard and all their heavy equipment is diesel so they treated the truck like any other diesel, no additives, no special care and ended up with a dead engine. <br><br>Replacement engine is being installed this week along with a new radiator. (They had pulled and lost the radiator since they were going to replace the IDI with a gasser before finding out it was too major of a job.) <br><br>So for less than half the cost of a used one I get a good truck.<br><br>I'm a woodworker so I need to haul lots of lumber and I mill a lot of my own lumber so I have to haul large logs as well. Kind of hard to haul a 1 ton log in a 12 year old Dodge Caravan. Lost an old growth 10ft, 36in Oak log last month because I had no way to move it.<br><br>Would have preferred a Dodge Diesel, but at the price it was too good to pass up.<br><br>Except for a lot of bed dings it's in great condition. Still Shiny. <br><br>Only problem with it is its Black and we live in Birmingham Alabama.<br>[/quote]<br><br>Still trying to find time to take my chainsaw over to some cedar trees the road commission cut when clearing ditches. Couple big ones would make some nice furniture, couldn't get them on the truck myself, got a nice load of 6-12 inchers under 8ft long. Need to rip the big ones, don't have anybody to help load'm. I see lots of nice oaks and pines I have to pass up for lack of time. Should quit this day job, maybe after it finances a bandmill

 

Well the snow storm was in '93 and actually it was not so bad considering that this is an area that does (or did not) have snow plows, snow blowers and the like. Biggest problems was the power outages. Actually I drove the next afternoon 25 miles on I-20 and I-459 to check our restaurant to see if the freezers were still on. I did that in a '91 Geo Metro. Went pretty good, no stuck situations.

 

My wife works in a hospital lab and had to go in the day of the storm. We're about a mile from the lab so I figured I'd just run up a quick set of cross country skis for her to go in that afternoon. <br><br>While I always took skis for granted, I forgot that being a Montgomery, Alabama girl she had never been near skis before in her life. That afternoon we ended up with me and our boys laying on the porch laughing too hard to stand watching her try to work out how to use them and her language becoming less and less like the traditional Southern Belle. <br><br>In the end I broke a snow trail for her so she could walk.&lt;g&gt; I still have the skis tucked away int he garage or the basement somewhere.

 

Redleg, I'm planning to install a heavy electric winch at the head of the bed just below the edge just for hauling logs up a ramp into the bed. Heavy logs are not easy to handle even with rolling equipment and trying to manually get a large on up into that bed is more than I care to tackle at 51 years old. I'll let technology do the job for me.<br><br>And yes, ceder would be nice. Being in Michigan you also have a lot of birch around which I like. Birch forests are not a common sight in Alabama. Took my wife on a trip up through the UP couple of years ago. She loved the Birch forests up there.<br><br>

 

Just went through there in Oct. We are loaded with Aspen too. Good hard wood as long as it's dry. That cedar was quite a bit lighter than the pine logs I move. Seemed like Balsa. <br><br>Winch would be nice, got to get the truck fixed up first, just got it, didn't know I would get this involved fixing it up. It's refreshing not spending $300 here and there for elctronic's or emission control's