Why does Ford pinch pennies with their radiators?

[Rev]

I once bought a brand new '75 Ford Granada Ghia with the 351W. It was a beautiful car in my opinion, but it did leak from the petcock where it screwed into the radiator. I looked down there and it was obvious that the brass petcock had been cross threaded into the radiator at the factory, thus causing the leak.

I took it to the dealer under warranty. It came back with some "plumbers helper" epoxy smeared around the cross threaded petcock, thus momentarily stopping the leak. I then removed the petcock and cleaned up the mess of the epoxy crap. I then was able to very carefully restart the petcock back into the radiator the way it should have gone in to begin with.

Needless to say, I wasn't exactly thrilled with the way my new Ford started it's career. There were many other issues that followed, but that was the first and the dumbest.

Rev