Originally Posted By: Jaymus
Originally Posted By: tig1
Disregard the book. My 4.6 is very quite even with 210,000 miles.
M1 oils
That's... what I said. I said the 4.6's were quiet. Mine was quiet on Castrol GTX. Don't disregard mah book!
Oh sure! Disregard a guy who has rebuilt hundreds, if not thousands of these engines, has connections with Ford and well known performance builders of the Modular Ford, such as Sean Hyland, and has researched extensively. All because of your one experience with one engine. Sure.
Look, while I am trying to be a wiseacre here, I do it to make a point and not to torque you off.
It's human nature to extrapolate our personal experience as the "way of the world." Besides, who knows what you consider "noise" vesus what other people call it, could be light years apart. For all we know, your hearing is as shell-shocked as mine is!
Fact is, though, Ford has had a fair number of engine noise complaints with the modular, especially back when the 4.6L was first introduced and through the '90s. They addressed them and made big improvements but still, according to people in the performance industry I've spoken with, they are still "generally" considered to be "chatty" engines, though whatever noise they exhibit is not considered to be harmful. I guess it all depends how conscious a person is of such things. You would tend to be more so with a brand new car than with a car that has given 210K of trouble free service.
In Reid's book, the engine they use for the rebuild is a low miles warranty pull-out that was replaced because of a noise complaint. Upon teardown, they find a nearly perfect engine with nothing wrong. That's when he gets into the noise issue and says, for the most part, a little noise is not harmful.
If you want to hear another anecdotal comment, I have a 5.4L with 15K miles and it's not particular noisy from my POV, but I can hear some chain noise and a little piston slap if I listen carefully with the hood open... especially when its cold. I have categorized it as "normal" and tune it out.
Going back to my main point, it's intellectually foolish to discount a book, a) especially without having seen it, and b) when your level of experience doesn't measure up to the author's. I'm not necessarily saying the guy is 100 percent right about the noise issue, or that you or I have to accept everything in the book as gospel (once you've read it, of course). It's just not a good idea to laugh it off with a glib one-liner when you've never laid eyes on it.