The 2.3 is the most overbuilt, indestructible engine I've ever had the pleasure of working with.
It's also been pretty powerful for it's size over the years, 215hp from 140cid in 1986? Yeah that was with a turbo, but heck, it made 109hp from 140cid in 1974... (0.78 hp per cubic inch... compare that to a 1987 5.0 Mustang's 225hp from 302cid (0.75hp per cubic inch!))
I bought my 1974 '
stang with an already high-mileage 2.3 and started modifying the hell out of it, hoping to kill it so I could justify putting a 289 or 302 in it with my parents... that was when I was 17.
I'll turn 22 in a couple of weeks, and I just pulled that 2.3 out this year because she was smoking out the tailpipe with just a hair over 300,000 miles on the odometer... that's right, there's FIVE zeroes behind that three! What did I put in there???
ANOTHER 2.3, this one out of a 1988 Mustang LX my family owned for two years, that engine got an oil change three times in all of that time, was driven daily with only two working gears in the A4LD
tranny behind it, meaning it saw up to 6500rpm on a daily basis for over a year, and when I sold the car to a friend who was doing a 5.0 project, I kept the engine... tore into it, and found a little bit of bearing wear, but not enough to justify buying another set for an engine I was just going to "run hard till she puked" anyway... that was this summer... she's still running hard, over 100,000 on this engine between the THREE vehicles it's been in (was originally pulled out of a wrecked low-miles Ranger) modified just as radically as it's predecessor except for the camshaft, and I'm still trying to justify a V8 swap... I have a fairly hard time doing so since my 5.0 blew up a few weeks after buying it... but a 2.3 turbo swap is always tempting...
Oh, and the original smoking 300k+ 2.3??? Turned out to just need valve stem seals after 31 years and 300k+ miles... everything else was still within tolerances... not bad for an engine that SUCKS!
I chalk that up to how overbuilt the thing is, it's main bearing caps are as big as the ones on a Chevy V8, it's oil pump is nearly the same size as one in a 460, it's camshaft has a retainer plate on it from the factory, something that's an "upgrade" on several engine families, the compression's reasonably good on almost all of them (9.0:1 or higher on almost all of the non-turbo versions) bolts that are bigger than what's in the bottom of a 302 hold the bottom end together, and the block, head, and manifold castings are some of the thickest-walled stuff I've seen on any engine, if I dropped a 2.3 head on my garage floor, I'd probably just bolt it on the engine without a second thought, if I dropped one for a Ford 302? or a Chevy 350? or just about any other engine? it'd go to the machine shop to be checked out first!
Do I wish my 2.3 had a little more power? hell yeah I do, but do I think it sucks? NO!
