Understand now...

You still didn't answer my other questions: Summarized- How in the heck did you throw forged rods? Trying to grasp that. You say you were running a bottom-end with forged rods at around 500 hp. For the norm on a healthy bottom end, that would be fine. So... Trying to figure out what else might have been involved. Going back through the thread and reading your posts-- you didn't really confirm that had were running forged rods or powdered... I guess I just assumed that from what you did say.

So is the motor that blew your truck's original motor? You just said that one you have was a cracked block because you ran it with no anti-freeze... but you didn't say if that was the original from this truck or not. Your saying that could be translated that "IT" was the original... or that t was one you had from another truck and kept to use as parts... That did imply that the motor that blew was not the original motor from your '95. Just trying to fish for info if the motor that blew was the original '95 (with forged rods) or a later model with powdered rods.

If original, then you have a fairly accurate idea of how much mileage was on that motor and be pretty sure that it had forged rods. It not, then you could look at the casting numbers to know what year it was... but only have a guess to it's mileage/wear (if it was used).

Or you might have just gotten a bit too wild. Happens. (I've blown my share of gas motors.) Tuning would have removed some of the fail safes that are there in a stock tune (rpm, top speed limiters, fuel, pressures, etc.). Something went south.

Like I said. I'm an curious sort. Just trying to understand the "why" of that. That's just me. I usually don't just fix something by replacing parts. I often spend the time to discover why it failed to correct that, so it doesn't happen again. In what you described here, it "should" have been fine... But it wasn't. It blew.

It just didn't blow after building stress over time. It blew in early testing and exploration. Reminds my of a race motor of a car I crew chief'ed for. We ran on a fresh motor every weekend. Every Thursday night, we swapped motors. Early in the week, we were doing different things to different sections of it-- body, motor, electronics, suspension... Running super stock, we usually ran out of power before we reached engine failure limits. One week, one of my people forgot to torque the caps. Not that we can plan for everything or that we want them to, but things do happen sometimes. I found it on tear-down and that person never made that same mistake again...

If high-wear or powdered rods where there, that would be one explanation to your adventure. Luckily, you have 3 other motors there to mix/match/create a new replacement motor. Trick is to get that "right" combination of parts.

Like I implied with this and other posts, with that "right combo" of parts, (bp & balanced helps,) at 500 hp, you should run out of power before you run reach a failure point.

Sharing some of my past failures... Most of them were from 10-10-10. Meaning that late in that game you think you are behind and panic. To try to catch up we ignored some of those calculated limitations. The old saying 10-10-10 comes from haplessly adding 10 pounds more boost, 10% more nitro and opening up the fuel nozzles by 10%... and go for broke. "Broke" is actually what usually happened with that methodology.