Who got it first??

[COPPERHEAD85]

The Dakota had a V-8 and straight axel front also.

 

[Hahnsb2]

The Dakota had a V-8 and straight axel front also.

Nope, IFS...

For what I do, I'll take my Dakota over a ranger any day

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

You sure about the dakota R/t and not SRT? I was selling vehicles at automax and had one one the lot. They came with 10" wheels(wide) and a manual as well. I thought the R/T and SS/T were the fullsize verisons.


Either way, Fords multivalves are as reliable as it gets. How many navi motors you here being blowed up? How many cobra motors you hear about being blowed up without 40+lbs of boost? All teh Dohc's Ive experience have outlasted my Sohc's and pushrod motors. Mazda may have produced the ranger motors, But I dont believe they produced the sohc 2.3 for hte mustang from 85-93. In 95 I believe was the 4 valve boss 5.0 ( I could be mistaken it'sbeen so long. And in 2000 was a dohc 351 for the cobra R. All badass reliable motors.

Pretty sure about the Dakota R/T thing. The Dodge Ram SS/T was a sport truck version in the mid 90's. The Ram SRT-10 was a later version of that with a much bigger engine in the new bodystyle in the 00's.

There was never a 4 valve Boss 5.0 in a '95 Mustang, Ford did make a prototype pushrod 4 valve 5.0 and compared it against the 4.6 for the next Mustang engine but it lost and it never went into production. They recently played withe 4.6 to come out with the 5.0 Cammer that you can buy from Ford Racing though. The 1995 Cobra R had the pushrod 2 valve 351W with 300 hp squeezed out of it. The 2000 Cobra R used the DOHC 5.4 (331 CU"), as do the current GT-500 family (they are not identical engines though)

As far as longitivity goes I have never really noticed much of a difference between OHC and pushrod, been driving for 9 years and knocking on wood I have yet to have either give up on me. I do like the simplicity of the pushrod engines though, and they are MUCH more compact. I do know many OHC engines have died a terrible death when either the belt or chain breaks and the valves hit the pistons... not as common for a pushrod engine to be an interferance design (both my Eclipse 2.0T with a timing belt and my 5.4 with a timing chain are interferance) A plus for Ford is they do not make an interferance engine with a timing belt, which is obviously more likely to break than a timing chain.