6.4L Powerstroke

If you're like most 6.4L Powerstroke owners, your truck is your livelihood. It gets you around, carries your tools, tows your equipment, and anything else you need to get the job done. You rely on your 6.4L every day and want to keep it healthy, but your 6.4L isn't as diligent about its own well-being.

Like all modern internal combustion engines, the 6.4L Powerstroke generates blow-by. This blow-by is made of carbon, oil, fuel, and water vapors that leak past the piston rings during combustion. Blow-by can be extremely detrimental to the bottom end of an engine if left unvented. The pressure from blow-by buildup can push out seals and reduce engine power. The corrosive nature of blow-by can also damage engine bearings and reduce oil life. To get the blow-by out of the bottom end, modern engines (including the 6.4L) utilize a crankcase ventilation (CCV) system.

This 2008-2010 Ford 6.4L Powerstroke Aluminum Degas Tank is now available. Click here to check it out!

Our last 2008-2010 Ford 6.4L Powerstroke aluminum degas tank post ended on a high note. We had pushed through challenges, taking an overcomplicated, ungainly design and creating one of our most refined prototypes to date. With the help of Powerstroke forum members and our future customers we decided to trim down our design to include only the degas tank while reusing the stock battery tray. This strategy required cutting the stock degas tank off the battery tray, but our engineer thought about that and created a simple plate to cover up the cut line and make installing our tank a seamless affair.

Before we

One of the hardest aspects of design is often knowing when to stop and take a step back. Failure is never fun, but we've learned that failure is just the beginning of a better design. Nothing is a complete failure, it's just another step forward.

When we last saw our 2008-2010 Ford 6.4L Powerstroke aluminum degas tank, it had become a mess of extra parts that didn't add any value for our customers. Thanks to Ford's design team, who apparently didn't know when to stop, our degas tank was trying to be a degas tank, battery tray, and vacuum chamber. All of this was in an attempt to keep our customers from having to cut their degas tank from the battery tray. After building a prototype that combined all three components, we decided to change course. All the extra components had turned our simple degas tank into an expensive monstrosity. We turned to the forums for some perspective.

As vehicles become more complex, so does designing aftermarket parts for them. When components play multiple roles, every detail must be carefully measured and accounted for. The 2008-2010 Ford 6.4L Powerstroke degas tank is no exception to that trend. Even ten years ago, manufacturers like Ford were finding ways to over-complicate even the simplest coolant tank. Building our aluminum replacement for this tank has been challenging, but that's exactly how we like our projects.

Our last post looked at the stock degas tank and we learned that the tank isn't just playing double duty, but triple duty. Molded into the bottom of the stock tank is the battery tray. No big deal. But, below that battery tray was another

Few activities in the automotive world are less fun than trying to gauge the fluid level inside an aging coolant tank. Like cleaning a bathroom drain, it's a not-so-subtle reminder that no matter how clean you keep the outside, there's something nasty happening inside. In the case of the 6.4L Powerstroke engine, the cast iron block and porous plastic tank mean that a grungy brown blob inhabiting your engine bay is inevitable. Oxides and other contaminates will eventually enter the coolant and be spread across the inside of the degas tank.

Considering even the newest 6.4L is eight years old, cracking and leaks may soon become more pressing issues than just being ugly. We've learned from other vehicles that plastic is a cost-effective and acceptable material for most components in the engine bay; but

The pre-sale for this trans cooler is now live! Click here to check it out!

As Dan inched our 6.7L F-350 onto the trailer, the October sun beat down onto the black asphalt. It wasn't even 11:00AM and the thermometer read almost 80°F; hot for October in Delaware, but perfect for transmission cooler testing. I climbed into our 6.0L F-250 follow vehicle while Dan cranked down the straps on the trailer and we set out for an afternoon filled with hills and valleys.

Our last look at the 6.4L Powerstroke transmission cooler revealed something a bit out of the ordinary for our blogs. Instead of highlighting all the failures of the stock transmission cooler, we shared that there really aren't many, yet. Yes, the stock 6.4L trans cooler is good enough. Good enough for a stock truck. Good

What defines a limit? In the English language, a limit is "a restriction on the size or amount of something permissible or possible." In practice, however, limits are not always as rigid. Anybody who's ever mastered a sport or skill will tell you, limits are made to be pushed and broken. A limit is only as defined as one's willingness to accept it. In the automotive industry, limits are often found by exceeding them. We push our cars and trucks until flaws appear, then step back and find a way to make them better.

Physics tells us that almost everything has limits, whether or not we've found them yet. Air at a certain temperature can only absorb so much heat energy, and transmission fluid loses its ability to lubricate beyond a specified temperature. Add a transmission cooler between the two, and you have hundreds of variables that will decide the limits of what's possible for your truck. In the case of the Ford 6.4L Powerstroke, the limits have yet to be defined.

So far, we've examined chassis flex on the 6.4 Super Duty trucks and we've taken a look at our solution in its construction, design, and testing. As our Mishimoto 6.4 Upper Radiator Support Bar pre-sale comes to an imminent close, I've got just a bit more to share!

Namely, I think it's time we show you some trucks! As I've mentioned before, we've been working with numerous 6.4 owners to test this bar out, and things have gone great so far. The bars have seen many thousands of miles, and we've had some of our satisfied testers send in some cool shots of their support bars installed on the trucks.

Check them

Welcome to the second blog post detailing the development of the Mishimoto 6.4L Powerstroke upper radiator support bar. Last time, we looked at why front-end chassis flex in the 6.4 Super Duty has the potential to exceed a safe magnitude, using our advanced American architecture as a comparison. We learned that too much flex spells possible consequences, so we made it our goal to stiffen things up. But how did we do it?

We did it in the most American way possible - through innovation.

The Mishimoto 6.4 not only served as a great testing and engineering platform, but also as a useful tool