Built Borrowed Tough: Neighbor’s Ford F-250 XL

When it comes to pickups, brand loyalties can be intense.
There are Ford guys and Chevy guys, Toyota guys and Dodge guys. Even the occasional Nissan guy or International-Harvester guy.
I’m a borrowed guy.
I’ve never owned a pickup of my own, but I’ve never had a problem finding one when I needed one. When I lived near his home, I just borrowed my dad’s truck.
Now that I live several hours away, I turned to a neighbor recently when I needed to haul away the debris from a remodeling project.
I think I found the perfect truck.

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It’s a 1993 Ford F-250 XL with a little more than 192,000 miles on the odometer. It has plenty of foibles — the transmission has a bit of a stutter and you have to roll down the window to open the door — but it hauled six loads of drywall, lumber, carpet and assorted construction waste from my driveway to the dump without complaint.
The old Ford certainly looks the part of a “dump-run” truck. It’s a beat up old beast, but it’s got a commanding presence thanks in part to a row of amber lights across the roof. I’m not even sure if they work, but they look cool.
Also, it’s got the “super-duty’s” protruding, chunky wheel lugs and a faded company logo on the doors, further bolstering its credentials as a serious work truck.

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When it comes to power, the Ford isn’t hurting. The 5.8-liter V8 under the hood has plenty of torque and a pleasing rumble.
It’s not exactly fast, though. Well, at least I don’t think it is. I didn’t  test the acceleration. One of the many words of caution my neighbor offered before handing over the keys was to baby the transmission.
It’s prone to stutter, he explained,  like you’re driving over a washboard. And he stressed the need to always turn off the overdrive that defaults to the “on” position each time the truck is started. Apparently something really bad happens if you forget to shut it off.
Hard launches seemed out of the question.
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Some other idiosyncrasies:

• The passenger door doesn’t work.
• The driver door doesn’t always latch securely, making it prone to fly open during right turns.
• Either the AC doesn’t work or the truck never had it, I’m not sure. In any case, it got hot enough inside for my T-shirt shirt to stick securely to the ripped vinyl bench seat.
• The left-turn signal doesn’t work, but that wasn’t a big deal since the window was always down anyway. Just hang out the left arm.

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Inside, the truck was a mess in the best possible way. There was a fine layer of dirt over the dashboard, work gloves on the floor and the aforementioned rip in the upholstery.
It’s a regular-cab, meaning space is surprisingly tight for such a large rig. And you sit bolt upright.
Braking was adequate for my purposes — even with several hundred pounds in the bed, it came to a stop without drama from the maximum 40 mph or so I achieved on the back roads of Gig Harbor.
Steering wheel play is about what you would expect in a truck of this vintage — there’s lots of it. Which is fine. It’s a work truck after all, and the constant need to saw the wheel back and forth means you’re always working to keep int going straight. There’s a stock radio in the dashboard, but I didn’t turn it on.

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A bed liner in the back meant I could toss chunks of old dry wall into the back with abandon.
Fuel economy is horrible — I’m guessing less than 10 mpg, though I didn’t track it carefully. On the plus side, there are two tanks.
All told, I used the Ford for six runs to the dump over two different weekends and I came away impressed, if a little lighter in the wallet after topping off the tank.
It did everything I asked it to do, and it looked the part of a serious truck when I backed it into position at the transfer station.
The truck has dump cred. Maybe the best thing about it, though, is that it lives in my neighborhood, but not my driveway.

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All you Chevy guys and Ford guys and Toyota guys and Dodge guys can brag all you want about your ride.
I like my borrowed truck. 

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