Mentioned before had a bad oil leak on front of 1995 Ford L8000 truck with the 8.3 Cummins.

Problem has been narrowed down to the front timing cover gear case. Seems on trucks the air compressor is mounted to the back side of this and either breaks the mounting bolts or stresses the cover enough to crack it. Sure enough this one is cracked from the mounting hole downward causing the large oil leak.  It already had an additional support installed under the compressor too.

It's a fairly involved repair where the lifters need blocked up to pull the cam in order to change out this front gear case. Sounds like an all too common issue on truck applications. Took this one to local truck repair place and they have another jut like it in a dump truck that has the exact same issue and they said it is a common failure.

Seems if it is so common there would be an updated front gear case made out of more durable or beefed up materials.

I've also read about the dowel pin of death on 5.9's and it sounds like the same set up is used on 8.3's but don't really see it being mentioned as problems in the 8.3?

Anybody have any other ideas or solutions ? As $pendy as this will be I sure don't want a repeat performance down the road. Told them to be sure and check crank dampener and anything else in this area of the tear down that needs attention. 

Not sure these are the exact units in question but they came up on a web image search and wanted to post them for reference to the issue I described.

(Cummins.JPG)

(Cummins2.JPG)

Cummins.JPG (57KB - 492 downloads)

Cummins2.JPG (121KB - 470 downloads)