Ecoboost 2.3 Engine Heritage?

[Fawnbuster]

Not to deviate too far from the 2.3L thread, but I like the Cyclone family - those are solid engines.
I have to believe that the various incarnations of the 3.5L EcoBoost are a fine engine based on my experience with a 3.7L Cyclone. I replaced the water pump on our old MKX, and that has the 3.7L in it - the Cyclone 3.5 is the base motor for the Ecoboost 3.5 - and I'm very happy with that engine having seen its internals up close when I pulled it apart for the water pump.
Outside of the water pump being in a silly place in the transverse-mounted Cyclone family, everything in there looks solid. I've always run synthetic oil (either Valvoline or Mobil 1, usually Mobil 1) in it, and changed its oil pretty much only when it asked, and even at that there were no visible traces of wear of any kind anywhere. The timing chain tensioner wasn't even fully extended. The valvetrain was immaculate, like you could eat off of it. Not even a scratch on any of the buckets, or any kind of forbidden glitter to be found anywhere. It's a solid motor. I changed that water pump at 100,000 to preempt a possible failure, and based on how good everything looked, I'm confident that motor could last long enough for another water pump maintenance at 200,000.
By the way, that water pump job was a real challenge (not something you'd have to consider on an F150 or Mustang using that engine family, as the longitudinally-mounted versions of that engine have a conventional, external water pump). My local mechanic refused to do it (and he's been servicing my cars for 25 years) and I wasn't about to take it to the dealer, so I took a week off of work last summer, moved the DeLorean out of the garage and the Lincoln in, and I took my time taking apart the Lincoln's motor. I impressed myself that I could get it done, but I was also very happy with the condition of everything I found inside that motor. If that Cyclone (or its Ecoboost 3.5 cousin) were an available option on the Ranger, I wouldn't hesitate to order it (the 2.7 Ecoboost with its wet-belt-driven oil pump, not so much...).
Before the Ranger, I used that MKX a few times to tow the boat around. The boat's weight comes in somewhere just under double the MKX's max-rated towing, so I was definitely, without question overloading it. It did it. That motor has plenty of power, and for something I was really asking it to do that was too much, it did the job.
The Ranger, of course, tows the boat like there's nothing attached to it. Sometimes I'll use the MKX to move the empty trailer around, but if there's a boat on it, there's no stopping the Ranger.

I would've loved to have that 3.5L twinspin in my Ranger.

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[JeeperCreeper]

Just logged in to laugh at the "wELL AkTuALLy" of the LeMans GT40 posts