_I_ haven't driven the truck, but my son says the gauge on the dash reads mid-range when running at speed, but drops to near zero at idle
- and he gets a rattle from the engine at the same time. So I believe it truly is low on pressure. As to the cause - we're hoping it's the pump. We're replacing it this weekend, and if the problem persists, we'll look at new bearings, etc next.
I don't know about the other questions, such as whether it's been run low on oil, or otherwise abused. He just bought it, and I don't know the history.
Now for the fun part: we started on it tonight; turns out dropping the oil pan is easy - there's enough clearance between it and the cross-beam that it comes right off (after removing a support bracket & a crossmember of dubious function). Here's the fun part - on this particular engine, the oil pump is actually wrapped around the crankshaft at teh front of the engine. So we have to strip the whole front of the engine and _remove_the_timing_set_.Since this is an overhead cam V-8, that entails pulling both valve covers and removal of THREE chains and sprockets to match.
I'd like to have a word with the bozos that designed this one....