No-headaches 6.9 Diesel

[Gary Lewis]

Well, I think the Novak site is partially right.  Tell me what you see on these pages from the new-to-me 1983 organizer.  

[Ford F834]

Gary,

I’m not quite sure what to make of this information. It seems incomplete to me at best. For the F150 it does not list a granny 4 speed as an option? That does not seem right. For the light duty F250 is says 3 speed manual (3 on the tree?) which does not seem right at all... and the F350 shows the 6.32 4-speed but no mention of the other two T19’s. Am I missing something? There is no specification for the 6.9 diesel trucks mentioned 🤷‍♂️

[Gary Lewis]

I didn't post all of the 2wd pages but I have scanned them.  Want me to post them?

As for the diesel, it is listed as an optional engine in the Powertrains section, but doesn't show in the 2wd section at all for any truck.  However, it does in the 4wd section, but in a strange way.  On one page there is a footnote that says "(1) Requires 7.5L (460 CID) 4V V-8 gasoline engine or 6.9L (420 CID) V-8 diesel engine."

And the two places where footnote (1) is used is for the "F250 4x4 Reg. Cab Pickup & Chassis Cab Over 8500 GVWR" and the "F350 4x4 Pickup And Chassis Cab".  But, get this: That footnote is only for California.  There is absolutely no other mention of the 460 or the diesel in any other application.  So, it appears that those engines were introduced in California in '83 but not the 49 states, and only on the trucks listed above.

But wait!  There's more!  The low gear for those CA trucks is 5.11, but the 49-state trucks got the 6.32 low gear.  It was a dark and stormy night, and the plot thickens.

Seriously, I'm not sure I'm up to creating the chart of which we typed.  That would be one complex chart from what I've just found - and that's for 1983 only.  Yes, it would be marvelous to work through the organizer for each year and figure out what trannies were available for each engine/GVWR combo, but it appears to be very difficult to do.  Maybe later as we get our heads around things?

[Ford F834]

Gary, I completely agree. I think trying to define which trucks got which gear sets is not a good use of time, especially taking into account special orders and the possibility that some of it may have simply been supply driven. I think this is why Novak makes generalizations and uses wording like “reported” and “observed” to back these up.

I do think that offering a list of the known gear sets for each transmission model is still a good idea. It is one of the most commonly asked questions on the forums, and having an accurate list of possibilities is what you need to begin to figure out what you have. No matter what the tangle of literature says, nothing will replace crawling under the truck to positively ID the transmission and verifying the ratio with shaft revolutions if more than one variant exists.

[Gary Lewis]

Jonathan - I'm thinking we might be able to do better than just a list of gearsets/ratios.  For instance, I think we just learned that all 1983 T-19's had 5.11 first gears.  (And all 420's and 460's in '83 were sold in CA.)  If you compare that to the Manual Transmission Application page you can see that those must be the "T-19" transmissions and were used from 1983 through 1985 for 420's and 460's.  But in 1984 a T-19A and a T-19C were introduced, and one or both of those probably had the 6.32 first gear.

So we could document the fact that all 1983 T-19's had the 5.11 ratio and were sold behind the diesel and 460 in CA - and give our references for that statement.  (And, if someone really wanted to work things out, the application chart gives the parts list for each transmission and you could compare the gearsets.)  We could build this info up bit by bit as we figure it out.

[Ford F834]

This is interesting Gary, I have never heard of a 5.11 behind a diesel but according to the documentation that is what should be there... but did they really only sell 7.5’s and 6.9’s in CA for the 1983 model year? The 1983 advertisement video that I linked a while back shows 5.8L as being N/A in California, and says the 6.9 or 7.5 are a “required option” in CA for the F250 HD and F350. It does not say anything about them ~only being available in CA, but specifies that the A3 (automatic) transmission was only offered with the 5.0 only in California... it’s all around the 19 minute mark:
https://youtu.be/XMpvdt63Ryg