Well maybe the head gasket plague has hit me... Tonight I decided to switch from my tow tune which i use as a daily driver to my srl tune. Well man is that tune have a lot more power....well I got on it in 4th gear my boost went to about 32 psi and then splat the coolant burped. It was a pretty big burp, it sprayed coolant vapors all of and man did it stink in the cab. Do you think this could just be the degas cap? My coolant and oil temps stayed within 6 degrees of each other on the way home and there was no loss of power I have noticed. I also did not notice and oil or fuel in the coolant. Any way to know if this was just the cap failing?

Thank

 

Most auto stores will rent a cap pressure tester:
Search: coolant cap test | Cooling System Test Kit | AutoZone.com

I just used one this weekend. Stock cap was holding all of about 4 psi. Bought and installed a new one for under $5.

 

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Ok thanks, what pressure should the cap be able to hold? Did you replace it with a ford cap?

I also noticed my coolant level was kinda high this morning when I checked the truck. There was no coolant in the oil or vice versa. Driving the truck to work it did burp up some more coolant! I am getting kinda worried. Also I did not notice alot of residue all over the degas bottle like I see in all the pictures posted on here but everything under the hood on the drivers side was pretty well soaked with coolant, even looking in the wheel well you could notice the coolant on the underside of the truck.

 

I'll be watching this as well - overboost, aggressive tune and bingo, dumping coolant. It would be very nice if it's just the cap, but my pessimism is saying no coincidence, no studs, bad time to try the fancy tune... I really hope not. I'm having a hard time coming up with a correlation between the 32 psi and the coolant burp that doesn't include headgaskets.

Brian

 

If you're running a hot tune with no studs its only a matter of time........

 

I dont know if i would call it much over boost considering I can get 30psi of boost on the stock tune whenever I am in 3rd, 4th or 5th gears and whenever I am towing I reach 30psi of boost easily on my tow tune (10k-15k trailer usually hay...). Also the SRL tune is designed for non-studded trucks. That being said I know running this tune will increase my chances for what seems like an inevitable HG failure. The truck runs good, my deltas are good and driving to work today i experienced no loss of power.

I guess I need to find out where I can find one of those pressure testers for the cap. Also after further review online, I beleive I have the old style coolant cap and there is no updated coolant level sticker on my degas bottle.

 

Factory maximum boost is 28 psi, so anything over that I consider an over-boost situation. And from what I understand over-boost is known to cause head gasket issues on non-studded trucks. Now, I do think that what lot of tunes do is allow over-boost,a long with other tuning tricks, but just putting that out there for you to consider.

 

Understood, but on my factory tune I can reach 30 psi of boost relativly easily (read with an auto meter gauge tapped into the aluminium intake elbow). Could this be caused by a problem with the turbo?

what really bums me out is I recently deleted the egr system and rebuild the oil cooler. I should have just done the studs and new gasket while i was there, but the old saying if its not broke dont fix it came to mind. If it is the HG i cant decide if i want to do it myself or have it done somewhere...

 

Which tow tune are you using? If its Matt's he only recommends pulling up to 8k with it on factory head bolts so that might be how you blew the gaskets.

 

unlimited tow tune from matt


maybe it was just my time.... I am still hoping its the coolant cap

 

I think this is driving the difference. If you consider that the computer reads boost as a comparison in MAP, BARO, and whatever else there's a lot more chances that one or more of those is off by a PSI or two in the truck than in a single pressure gauge in the elbow (which could also be off by a PSI or three). I can see a reading of 28psi to the computer showing up as 30psi to an aftermarket gauge, just from taking the reading at a different place than the stock sensors and introducing another level of tolerable error in another sending unit. If you stack enough +/-3% tolerancess on each other eventually you get a material difference.

 

Well this is pretty disappointing then. I was finally about to pull the trigger on an SCT after reading a bunch of posts from people that have been fine

Good luck hopefully its not your headgaskets

 

Although now that I think about it, maybe the tune wasn't at fault. If you were hitting 32psi you might have a turbo problem causing the overboost, as the SRL shouldn't put your boost that high

 

well i was thinking about this, like texastech said above the flucuations what the truck reads for boots and what my mechanical gauge read can be two different things. When i compare the boost gauge on my scangaugeII it would differ from my autometer gauge. maybe my computer ws actually only letting it go to 28 psi, but the actual gauge says somthing different.