I wouldn't be afraid of 6.0 either. Just leave it stock and use Synthetic Oils in it! I have two '05 Excursion 6.0's, one with 250000 and one with 180000 on it. I did put two injectors into one of them, the one that is stock, and did all the other maintenance to the other, including the oil cooler, egr delete, exhaust, SCT tuner, head studs, machined heads and new OEM gaskets, but other than that, they've been awesome! I only did those things as preventative. Truck had 140000 trouble free miles before I did all the work. I had a 2000 7.3 as well, and I acutally like my 6.0's much better.

Same topic, 6,801, wait er now 6802 threads.

Early (2003-2004) 6.0L questionable.
Later (2005-2007) 6.0L decent.

Best advice about a 6.0L, as posted here on OSO:
If you are going to keep a 6.0L for the long term, keep $8K in the bank because eventually it will cost you that in heads, head gaskets, studs, and injectors; including labor.

Do a search here on OSO and on there are petabytes of data to read on www.thedieselstop.com and the other diesel forums.

and to add to the mass i just did a engine in one that over heated and exploaded the coolent tank,,customer btought me a used engine that he paid 7k for,,,,soppose to have 20 k on it well that one lasted 2k miles b4 the head gaskets blew and the cups in the heads were so wore out i had to put new castings on that engine..

last week i had a 04 excursion with 6 bad injectors and a pos lift pump go bad,,shot the tip of the injector into the cylinder...205000 miles..i ordered all 8 injectors NEW from a ford warehouse and fished the tip out of the injector hole,,boy did he get lucky..

this afternoon i replaced a drum to drum diff..

2004 F-250 was the worst vehicle ever owned...... 2006 not a problem only owned through 64000 miles though. Just got something in the mail that I was going to be part of a class action lawsuit against Ford over the 04. It's not going to cover my losses, maybe 1K, but at least it's something.