So Sunday my wife is leaving the house to take Emily to the clinic in Searcy, she makes it to the end of the driveway and I get a phone call. "The van died and it won't go forward"
- Instantly I'm thinking "Oh lord, as if I had an extra 3 grand to spend on putting a tranny in this thing"
She managed to get it into reverse and backed it the 500ft or so back to the house, got my car and went ahead to the clinic. I pulled out the Superchips and pulled the codes..P0715 and P0717
- both of which refer to loss of communication with the Transmission Speed Sensor. So I look it up at Autozone and have the wife stop and get one on her way home, about $28 so not a bad gamble.
I put it in and cleared the codes, no difference, the codes came right back and the issue persisted.
Then I found a TSB where Ford had identified an issue with water getting under the cowl and into the pcm and the connector. So I decided to pull all of that apart.. where I didn't find any water,
but there was an oily residue in the connector which I attributed to some sort of die-electric grease.
I decided to go ahead and pull the pcm apart and check for water damage while I had it all apart. When I got it out, I realized that there was a dried puddle of the oily residue on top of the pcm.
(which is inside the car, with the connector sticking through the firewall)
My best guess after seeing this with desktop computers is that a mouse pissed on top of the pcm and it ran down into the connector where it eventually dried and caused an issue on the TSS pins.
I cleaned all this up with some electrical contact cleaner and got her back together last night.. took it for a test drive and she shifted out fine, no codes
With only 80k on the van I'm guessing it had sat for a good while at some point as there was no evidence of any damage from mice otherwise..
Long story short, yes the van was taken down by ****, mouse **** none the less.. at least it had the courtesy to die at the end of the driveway.. and not when we were in Mississippi at Christmas.
It's worth the trouble, just for the hard times I can give the wife about leaving cheese in the car
