Postby skinny2 » Fri Jul 26, 2013 1:58 pm
I think it's been pretty clear that your PF had a pretty harsh life before you bought it. How things are cared for will certainly impact their reliability down the road. I'm not personally the best at washing my car, but I do try to keep up with it in the winter. They use a ton of salt on the roads here as well and my PF doesn't look any worse underneath than anything else I've owned.
To compare things that AREN'T taken care of.....for my company, I'm rotating out 2008 model trucks that have been used in limestone and coal mines. They're very rusty underneath...and if you looked under one of these and under my PF it's night and day. Those company trucks are used hard, rarely washed, off-roaded daily, and quickly becoming unreliable to be driven 40k miles a year. From here on they won't be used on-road anymore. Within three years those trucks will be sold for scrap as by then they'll have complete rust-through in the beds, frames will be getting weak, interiors torn apart, and they'll be lucky to just run without constant repair. How many trucks with typical road use would be totally worn out within 8 years?
I don't think anyone around here has had as many issues with their late model PF's as you and to hear of that kind of rust underneath...you just have to assume something has seriously happened to that rig. I'm crossing 100k miles and outside of a radiator and sway bar bushing, I haven't done a thing. I would have thought a pre-purchase inspection would have told you to run from that thing if it looks like that underneath.