Forget all the speculators. The guys who've done it can tell you. Here's my 48 KB 1. Original chassis, suspension and steering. Disc brakes, and a 9". Driven daily for 5 years and across country while pulling @ 70 mph in 107 degree heat (see pic). Got about 300k hard miles on the 345 with an old Sig Erson cam and a pertronix (pulled from my 72 4x4 at about 200k) It's backed by a T-19. Valve guides are worn, 2 lifters tick for about the 1st 15 seconds, but it goes like stink, does rolling burnouts at will in 1st and second, and revs to about 5k. I can't bring myself to freshen it up because it runs so strong. I say go for it. ...And you won't have to lower the nose!
Can't recall the owners name, but there was a guy from Texas who ran a Scout in SCCA pro rally series during the 70's early 80's. Thing was large and fast compared to the smaller vehicles running then. Sounded great coming through the woods at midnight, breaking branches along the roadside and hearing it at full throttle. The engine in the Scout looked impressive and reportedly ran over 500 HP!
The guy I work with has one of the short blocks that came from that race team. That thing had some big bumps on the pistons was told they were for a propane fueled engine.
I must confess I learned a lot from this thread! I would love having the truck feel in a pick up, having a slow reving stump puller that can keep up with traffic would be an awesome pick up for me!!! And this thread is the evidence that a international mill would be a cool choise!
I've been an IH nut always having an early 80/800 scout or 3 around my entire life & their engines are industrial grade stuff. Low RPM grunt monsters. I acquired spec order 69 800a scout with a 392 v8 that's insanely powerful but is not a rpm motor. I've looked into mildly modifying them before but the performance gains are not worth the dollars involved. The water outlet probably weighs 10 lbs.! Some of the accessories like the water pump even interchange with the Ford / IH 6.9 & 7.3 diesels on some applications. Above 4000 rpm I'm afraid mine are going to fly apart. Flux
Here's another thread I did a while back on the same subject. http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/international-engines.829924/
Building vehicles is an art. As soon as you bring logic into it, we all end up driving Pro touring 69 Camaros with an LS (not to slight those cars in the least). The aftermarket support and horsepower to dollar ratio is unmatched, ...but where's the fun in that? Forget logic! Produce vehicle shaped art that makes you smile. ...And 73RR, ...the new responses go to show that forums are conversations that can be paused indefinitely and unpaused at any time. While the user name is new, I'm far from it.
...And to support my "discard logic" philosophy, here's my newest "family car", complete with 2 car seats in the back.
Well, this thread's not too old to drag it up. Was doing a search on something else and found this, thought I'd share some of my experience with the IH engines. I cut my teeth working at an IH farm tractor dealership, and we had a lot of the IH pickups, medium duty haulers and service trucks, and some Scouts for parts running. The engines went from the little 152 slant 4 up to 392 V8's. Many, many of the medium duty trucks were running even the 345 V8. These engines will run seemingly forever with minimal maintenance. When you finally do tear them down with multiple hundreds of thousands of miles on them, you'll find hardly any wear at all, the cross hatch pattern will still be in the cylinders with no ridge at the top. Gear driven cams mean no chains to wear out, and they aren't noisy like the aftermarket gear drives for SBC's. I was always impressed with the spunk of the 152 and 196 slant 4 engines in the Scout parts chasers, nice engines. Sure, they're just 4 bangers, but dang, with the right gearing they've got some spirit. I think a 196 would make an excellent alternative in a 4 banger hot rod. With the cross flow cylinder heads, some creative fabrication for a multi-carb down draft carb intake system a cam regrind and maybe a recurve on the distributor and I think you'd have a rod that would spank a Chevy II/Mercruiser powered rod. In the early 80's I had a 76 3/4 ton Suburban with a 350, and I got used to driving that. A year or 2 later I picked up a 71 IH 3/4 pickup with a 345, that's when the shades were lifted so to speak and I finally understood what the deal is. The first time I took the IH up to the local mountain resorts, I started out driving it like I would've driven the Suburban, when the rpm's dropped down because of the steep grades and winding roads I manually dropped the shift lever down to 2nd gear to keep the rpm's up and keep the engine in the power range. That's what you do with a Chevy. If you don't the engine loses power and you loose all your speed. Eventually the trans will downshift by itself, but by then you've lost a lot of momentum, and you have to start all over building it back up. Then when the engine is rev'ed out you have to upshift it again, at which time it starts to loose momentum again, and eventuaolly you have to downshift it again. Maybe you guys don't have mountains, aren't familiar with this routine. It's lug the engine down, downshift, rev the crap out of it, up shift, lug it back down again, downshift, rev the crap out of it again, and keep doing that till you reach the top of the hill. So there I am driving my IH like that, because that's what I learned to do with the Chevy. But at one point I didn't make the downshift, I just left it in Drive and was surprised when the engine didn't fall on it's face, the RPM's stayed right where they were and the engine just torqued it's way up the hill. Cool! We made it up the hill as fast or faster than we would've in the Suburban, and we didn't have to keep grabbing gears to do it, just let the engine fall back into it's torque range and chug on up the hill. Then I learned about torque rise, and it all made sense. Like the others previous in this thread posted, these are true truck engines, not passenger car engines re-purposed for a pickup truck. What's this have to do with a hot rod forum, not much I guess. Just thought I'd explain how these engines work. And just like any engine, they can be tuned to run faster, that's just not how they are designed to run stock. Same ol hot rodding tricks used on any other gas engine will work the same on them.
I drove a '77 1700 Loadstar with a 404 back then. It had all sorts of power pulling putting it to the test on North Shore with 7% grade for a few miles. It was a back up unit. The owner kept it in perfect condition. I recall looking at the tach to see if engine was running, it was that quiet. I was conditioned to noisy diesels.
Most of the time a Binder truck is a 45-55 MPH truck due to gearing and the low RPM 6s that they ran. I am a firm believer that anything can be made to perform better, but sometimes you have to throw a lot of money and ingenuity at it to do so. one could build an intake and an exhaust header easy enough and get the cam reground, port the head that sort of thing. I don't know that the returns would be all that great but you just never know until you try. Now for shits n giggles, IH did manufacture a nice little V8 in the '60s. I don't know what year they started with it but it was still around in the early '70s. They stuffed it in their light duty trucks. it was a 304" motor and there were some hop up parts for it at the time. Quite the snappy little truck motor.
Ancient photoshop........ To date, the strangest engine I ever had was in a parts rig, A turbocharged 152 4cyl in a 67 sport top 800. A previous owner added a hooker header & 2 bbl Rochester. Definitely a Bizarre little corn binder mill wish I'd kept it ......... Flux
Me too. If you had kept it I would be trying today to trade you out of it for my A. Just for grins. Anything can be built, look at the guys who are running banger cars. In my mind there is nothing more forlorn than Henry's banger but they hop 'em up and run 'em. Sometimes you have to think so far out of the box that you can't even smell the cardboard, that's racin'. my friends.
I'm prolly just kicking a dead horse but here's why I kept both my IH motors, in my 58 (240cid) and 67 (304cid). Everybody says, "put a 350 in it". You see them everywhere. 350's and LS swaps are so cheap and work very well for everything, but that's not the kind of truck I wanted. If I wanted a sbc I would have bought a Chevy truck. I love Chevys but that's not what I wanted when I bought my trucks. IH made outstanding motors. There not fast right out the box but they have a good flat torque curve and you rarely see them under a hood anymore. People are always complimenting me on how cool the motor is. And how smooth my 304 is. They look cool. They sound cool and there built to damn near diesel specs. Def one of the cooler mills under a hood with all these cookie cutter small block swaps flying around.
In my hoard I have two of the slant fours. A metro van with a 264 two barrell carb. A 69 Pk with a 304 and a 70 2 ton dump truck with a 345. And have owned lots of other binders over the years. All of my farm tractors that I use are farmalls. and they are very good for what they are designed to do. And I never considered them hot rod material. and still dont.
Just came across this thread. I have a ZZ4 SBC and TH350 in mine with a Valiant Charger diff. I went this way because I wanted reliability, modern performance and availability of parts. Here in the Antipodes IH parts are as rare as hen's teeth. The old IH 6 bangers had a very bad rep for busting valves. There are purists here in NZ that stick with the original engines - but they are more 'vintage' type people than rodders. The S model pickup is still one the nicest looking trucks of it's era - add that V8 'burble' and you are in heaven!!!
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