I have a 2000 Ford Ranger XLT RWD 3.0L Flex with 273,000 miles, 5 speed Manual. I’ve owned it for 11 years and plan to forever if I’m able. Last summer, I noticed I was low on coolant. I saw coolant on various parts of the engine so I cleaned the engine off and pressure tested the cooling system. I found the leak to be originating from the timing cover. I looked into the needed repair and was really off put by the amount of work to complete the repair and even more so by the cost of the repair if done at the shop. To save myself the stress, I tried the blue devil head gasket sealer as I found during research that it could help. It did by reducing the heavy drip to a very slow drip. Recently, I have been putting about 700 miles a week on the truck doing Doordash. The leak has come back with a vengeance. I got an estimate at a shop just to see and was given one for $2500!!! Wow. I can definitely do the repair myself, but what I’d like to know, considering the amount of work and the age and mileage of the engine, would it be better to repair or just replace the engine? A rebuilt 3.0 goes for about $1500 anywhere for reference.
I am always leery of rebuilt engines because you never know who rebuilt it. It may have the same, or more, issues than what you have now.
I'd also be cautious of a "rebuilt" engine. I have a 1999 Ranger 4×4 Off-Road w/the 3.0L, 262k miles and automatic transmission. Mine has been in the transmission shop four times in the last year because the shop messed up something when they rebuilt the transmission. 3 valve bodies and a lot of frustration later, they seem to have fixed it.
The 3.0L Vulcan V6 is a basic pushrod engine from the mid 80s, it has none of today's fancy variable vamlve timing and such. It's a cast iron dinosaur, so theoretically, it would be easier to take apart, but you never know how well it was done. Electronic fuel injection was its big advance. It's a pretty well made engine on Ford's part from my gathering and experience. A friend of mine had well over 400k mi on his Ranger with a 3.0 and 5 speed. When he finally sold it, the thing still drove down the road.
You might try to find a low mileage junkyard motor -the 3.0L Vulcan was extremely common in Ford vehicles! It was designed to be the base engine in the original Ford Taurus, and to my knowledge, it was used in the GL through the LX models at least until 1999, and probably longer. I believe they were also used in the Winstar, on top of the Ranger, so you may get lucky!
Good luck!
