good advice vin but i wish to correct one thing..about the stupid question. i think what you meant was they seemed stupid to you but there are really no stupid questions! cant stress it enough. the stupidest question is the one that goes un asked. good luck with that new ride.

 

That's what I meant! Thanks for clarifying. Some of the questions I thought were stupid probably saved me thousands of dollars and down time because I asked and got the right person to reply!

 

be very faithful on oil changes too, i have 206k on my 03 7.3 and it still runs like a champ, got a php tuner on it with the 120 race as my highest setting and it runs great , don't be afraid to ask questions either, there are a lot of people on here that know about everything there is to know about our trucks

 

I don't want to poke anybody in the eye, but while you're giving good advice, PMR's aren't quite as weak as we all originally thought.

This truck is still running a PMR motor, 226k on it, with some smallish injectors from Cass.


I DO NOT recommend hittin the RPM's that this one did at the big end of the track, but it lived through it. And towed a truck with a broken drivetrain home at the end of the night, now that I think about it


Moral of the story being, that if you're careful, and with the latest lessons learned in the tooning world applied to your tuning, you can make a little power and not throw the dice every time you plant the skinny pedal.

There's certainly not much reason to worry on stock injectors, as long as common sense is employed and nothing stupid has ever been attempted that "wounded" the motor before you got it. PMR's generally don't fall into that category though, they're either strait and solid, or readily identifying themselves as bad for you, by hangin out of a window in the block.

The engine Vin was talking about grenading itself during the test drive was probably a victim of TS's old "Fuel7" tune. The Fuel7 tune was released around 2003 and was never really intended to go public. You have to remember that 2003 was before the "custom tuners" got started with the 7.3. Story goes that a performance shop asked Dennis @ TS for "a bit more" and Dennis gave it his best shot, and sent the tune on it's way. Depending on who you talk to, depends on the version of the story, in relation to the tunes debut on the public market. Either way, as soon as Dennis realized what he had released, he pulled the tune from the TS library and today it doesn't exist. It claimed it's share of motors before it was stamped out though.

Other than that, do gauges first, a DIY intake second, and cut the muffler out of the factory exhaust and replace it with a strait piece of pipe. The exhaust will now support 400 HP. By the time you've got that knocked out, there'll be a whole slew of new questions bouncing around in your head, so swing back by and fire away.

In the meantime, I'd recommend getting my hands on a TS chip. The tunes on it are horrible in my humble opinion, but that same chip can be reburned for a fee by about a dozen different tuners. So you'll be able to keep the same hardware and use it over again as many times as you change your mind about which tuner to go with.

And last, the High Pressure Oil System that is responsible for the hydraulic pressure to "fire" our injectors tears the hell out of the oil on a 7.3. 3000 mile intervals are as far as you're probably gonna wanna push things, unless you get an analysis done that says your particular driving style will allow you to push it further.

I change mine every 3k.