About 6 or7 years ago my 1988 GMC 1 ton 4X4 pickup, without dual rear wheels, almost forced me to buy a low mileage used engine. It has the trusty 5.7 L or 350 cubic inch engine with TBI. I don’t drive very much. I worked about 6 miles round trip from my repair shop and drove about 4000 miles a year. To this day it only has 93000 original miles on it and it runs so good and looks so fine people want to buy it from me all the time. Not For Sale.
Understand that I have an advantage in terms of doing my own repair work, which saves the labor costs, so I would rather approach this as a consumer. If it was not fun or convenient for me to do my own labor, which would have been about 1000 dollars, It would take less than a nano second for me to decide that a low mileage good used engine was in my near future.
That being said, it developed what seemed to be a ‘deep‘ engine knocking sound. It ran great though. Being curious we took the top end of the engine apart first to inspect the heads and valve train. For all practical purposes we found nothing wrong. However, my gut feeling was it was not in the bottom half of the engine. Since the heads were off I had them examined and a valve job performed. If I were not curious and did not have the skills to investigate further into the engine, I would have been on the phone to Gotengines.com, ASAP and ordering a late model low mileage used Chevy engine for my truck right away. I need my truck.
My curiosity paid off, eventually I found one of the hydraulic lifters had literally ‘come apart‘. At that point, for me it became a no-brainer to buy the parts and fix it. I have the skills and special tools to perform this task. It was more work fixing the engine , than changing the whole engine with a used engine, as I said labor was not an issue.
Realistically speaking it would have cost a paying customer about the same amount of money to do this repair as opposed to getting a quality low mileage used Chevy 3500 engine and bolting it in.
My point is that when you look at the big picture, which is to get the vehicle on the road as fast as possible for an affordable cost, than a used engine would be a choice in the customers best interests. In 99% of the cases the used engine has less miles on it than the damaged engine in the vehicle you own. The nice part about a used engine with low mileage is that all of the parts have low mileage too, to repair an engine with lots of miles on it (100,00 plus) may create a situation for some of the other original engine parts to fail soon.
Enjoy our GotEngines.com blog and become an educated consumer. Educated consumers always make the best decisions.
