ZyonicVoid

Bio

About me

My personal interests are very straightforward, I'm into vehicles and engines and I play a lot of games. I've been building computers for about 3 years now and it continues to be my favorite hobby. As far as vehicles goes I like learning about them and learning to do my own maintenance. Doing you're own work can save you a large sum of money on labor fees, and for me it's a hobby so it's something enjoyable. It's really a win win scenario. If you share my interests in engines then I would suggest you looking into the Ford 7.3 Powerstroke as it is the engine I know the most about and have worked on the most. Moving on, I'm rather young but I am studying to be an engineer. Hopefully something in the electrical field, it'd be something that could build off my pc hobby.

My Wikipedia interests

Assuming I continue to be active after this class I am here for, I plan to research the 7.3 and create a proper page for it. I notice it currently doesn't have one and that would be a fun thing to expand my hobby.

Ford 7.3 Power Stroke Engine

I first encountered 7.3 Power Stroke engine around 2013 when I was eight. My farther owned on of the trucks that were outfitted with this engine. Being as young as I was, my interest in the engine began and ended with, ‘it was loud and sounded cool.’ In 2015 my dad had to sell the truck and I hadn’t thought much of it until last year when he purchases a 2001 Ford F-350 with a 7.3 diesel engine. Over the course of the last 2 years I have spent a significant amount of time researching and working on this engine with my father. I recently visited the Ford Power Stroke engine article on Wikipedia, and found three aspect of it worth commenting on: the 7.3 section, the lack of explanation on components, and last, leaving out information.

This article is very long as it covers, not only the 7.3 diesel, but every diesel engine that Ford has produced. To narrow it down, I want to focus on the 7.3 Power Stroke heading. As far as a critique goes, the first thing I notice is the lack of citation. After reading through it, I can confirm most of it to be true from my own experience, however the average person reading through this would not know what I do. For example, the part that really stood out to me was, "The '94.5-'97 engine utilizes a single turbocharger, non-wastegated, with a turbine housing size of 1.15 A/R." There's a lot of information in that one sentence however there's no citation to prove it's true.

The next thing I want to touch on regarding citation is links leading to explanations. At first I thought this article was just targeted at people who already new something about engine and just wanted to read up on ford, however they do have links leading to explanations on 'automatic transmissions,' as seen in this quote, "...of torque in automatic transmission trucks from the last years of production..." Which brings me to my point that they should also have had links leading to explanations of other complex components, such as the turbocharger. It is an incredibly important component of the engine and yet, if you're coming from a background regarding most petrol engines, you wouldn't know anything about them. This pattern repeats over the course of the article.

The last part of this article I'd like to discuss is the last paragraph of the 7.3 section of the article. Specifically, the first two sentences, "The engine used forged connecting rods until powdered metal rods were introduced in 2001. These new connecting rods sufficed in an unmodified engine, but would become a potentially catastrophic failure point if aftermarket tuning pushed the engine above 450 horse power." For reference, this engine produces about 250 hp from the factory. This is a relatively minor problem but I bring it up to further illustrate that this article gives very little thought to those who don't already have some previous knowledge of the engine. While it is true that the piston connecting rods can crack when hp exceeds 450, it is very difficult to achieve those levels of power from this engine. Not to mention that those levels of power only end up being a factor when racing situations. Again, not a massive problem and not something that requires you to delve deep into. However, I do think that a simple sentence such as, "without heavy custom tuning, you won't exceed 400 hp." For people who don't know a lot about cars and how much power is needed in trucks for average applications, this sentence would have helped them out a bit.

In conclusion, this article does go quite deep into the 7.3 Power Stroke. There are more issues than what I was able to cover here but overall it's an excellent article, and considering there's not a lot of information on the 7.3 consolidated and laid out for you, this article certainly stands out. I don't think this article can serve as the be all and end all of information on the 7.3, but it's not a bad article to get you started, and if you're interested, I highly recommend reading through it.