Mostly just jumping on the bandwagon. I don't know of any particular ring problems with the 2.7's. If anything the weak point on the motor would seem to be the wet belt driven oil pump and the VCT phasers, although I've not heard of any failures concering the former. The VRP was the same price as AFE & seems to have a higher HTHS but similar properties to AFE in most other (limited) respects that can be gleaned from a VOA. There seems to be a slight possiblity that VRP might prevent future problems that other oils would not. I did a few long-ish 7000 mile OCI's on motorcraft 5W-30 blend with this motor before I came to BITOG so I was slightly concerned there might've been some slight amount of build up from that, not knowing at the time what I was doing.
I was only using the M1 AFE 0W-30 because it was the only 0W-30 I could easily procure that had the ford WSS-M2C-963-A1 spec. I learned from BITOG that 0W isn't really a factor even for my climate; even though it's Alaska the record low in Anchorage is only -34F in 1975. On the average winter day the low is only 11F, plus the vehicle mostly lives in a heated garage (garage is a recent change in the past 6 months). I also learned that the ford spec is nothing more than a mirror of API SP/ILSAC GF-6a.
I'm running HPL PP PCMO 0W-30 in my other Bronco and will entertain myself with the futile and pointless exercise of comparing UOA's, and since I plan on never selling these (that's what we all say), comparing any maintenance problems in the future.
