Is there a list of things to go bad and the avg cost to repair

That's the way to do it, budget the money and set it aside. Sooner or later you'll need it.
I'd have to ask our bean-counter exectly what the set-aside is for our trucks. It varies. Most of the highway trucks are by the mile but our construction and off-road rigs are on an hourly set aside. It's a lot, I know that.
But every time I start yelling about operating expenses he shows me the printouts and exactly where the money is going and why it needs to be spent. And he's right. He's one of the reasons our little company keeps chugging along. He knows where all the money goes.

 

Budgeting $1G a month is a good idea. But I wouldn't start out from scratch. Something might happen that could surpass what you've been budgeting. And now your saved budget is in the negative. That might take 3 months to make positive again. To which something else might happen. And the process starts over again.

 

D E L E T E W O M A N

 

proper warm up before heavy use, proper cool down after heavy use, oil stays full, oil stays fresh, coolant stays full, no lugging the engine (impossible with an automatic), climb hills with a high RPM cadence, no idling, regular heavy engine brake use. what else can be done to increase component life? from my understanding they are designed to run constantly, like generators, so most of the stress and wear would be from (at) startup and heat cycling of materials, and accelerating from a stand still under load.

 

How come I've always been told the best way to warm up a motor is put a heavy load under it and roll?

 

i don't know, i know it warms up pretty fast if you do that, from 100 F to 200 F in just a few minutes once you get on the freeway. With an engine that big, with all that metal, i let it idle to 100 F if it's not already there at startup, then PTO (1k RPM) to 150 F. Metal is hard but it's still malleable, and when you're talking about components like valve heads/stems or piston rods or head gaskets being common points of failure, all that metal (the block specifically) is going to be doing quite a bit of expansion against those relatively thin components, i don't know by how much but when an engine has piston liners tolerances in the micron zoom level, i bet heat expansion/cycle would be about as important to consider in an engine TLC as it would a giant bridge, they have those huge expansion joints so it doesn't grind it's own teeth out of its head. the more i learn about engines the more i realize they are very much like a living organism that eats breathes and sheats, they aren't like clocks at all.