As long as I've owned the truck I never saw oil levels lower than about mid-stick *and that was post 1st incident*. Never had any odd noises/high temps/stumbling, etc. The lone issue I had prior to this was front drive shaft joint at the transfer case. I would have said unrelated, but very well could have been an indication that the truck was beat on by its previous owner (1-prior).
I think/hope that the metal we're seeing (which is more like a sheen than chunks) is from one, maybe 2 of the rod bearings being worn down... doubt they're "spun" as I'm not hearing any odd noise or having rough operation. Likely hard use, high operating temps, or no/infrequent oil changes for that first 60K miles just wore those bearing surfaces down enough and the problem snow-balled more recently. Even that's odd because I've only driven the truck about 3K miles since I bought it Feb. But the guys at the shop tell me its a quick process once the wear gets to the damage point. Plus they suspect the ECM doesn't qualify "low pressure" until it gets to roughly that 10psi mark. So it could have been running less-than-optimally for a long while and just finally hit the tipping point.
I'm finding that Ford doesn't even list a "short block" - long block assembly is around $3500/4 ... still doing some digging around, but I suspect the shop is going to tell me that the damage is enough to warrant more than just a few bearings. That or the accessibility is limited enough to where they'd need to pull the motor to do that kind of work well-enough (and at that point a full motor replacement is prob not too far off (in terms of cost).
