[oldE]

Back in my early days at the dairy, we had a couple of 72 Dodges in the home delivery fleet. I made some unkind remarks about the two 'odd balls' one day and my boss reached into a file drawer and pulled out several files. They were maintenance files and the two 318 Dodges had the thinnest files by far. It was later I found out one of the drivers never pulled the dipstick: he just waited until the oil pressure guage dropped off a little then dumped in a couple of quarts.

The other one was driven by an older guy who lugged the motor something awful. When he went on vacation, it would take me the better part of a week to get the carbon burned out.

One of my brothers in law bought an ancient Ford van with a 302 to pull a UHaul down from Toronto. When he got into the yard, my father in law checked the dipstick. Not a drop on it until they had added 2 1/2 liters! It wasn't even knocking!

When I traded my 88 Chev p/u, it had over 200K miles and was going strong.
As for big block Chevs, in my experience, most of them, including the 454 in another brother in law's Chevelle wagon, couldn't handle short cycle operation. Within a 100k miles they would burn oil like a supertanker's livelihood depended upon it. The only one I saw which didn't turn into a smoking collection of parts was the mail truck which ran by home. It would be started up at 7 AM, run like a bat out of heck all day and be parked around 6 that evening. The guy loved it.

The comment about these motors being understressed is spot on.
Les