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Hi,
I have a '99 F250 SD crew cab with the v-10. It only has 49000 miles as I mainly use it for hauling and towing (I have other vehicles for day to day stuff, hence the relatively low miles). For the last few months, I have noticed my fuel mileage has been dropping, and I can feel what I believe is a slight miss at idle. Recently, however, it has been acting up in that, while slowing down to a stop, the idle will drop very low for a second or two and then it will return to normal. Today it finally threw a check engine light. I don't have a scanner (yet), but I wanted to ask you guys your opinions. What I have done so far is this:
* change fuel filter
* clean MAF
* clean TB
* clean IAC
The coils and plugs are original. My gut feeling is that one (or more) coils are going bad. I was planning on changing out the coils, but leaving the stock plugs in there (b/c of the low miles).
At 12 years old, those plugs are not doing you any favors. I would use penetrating oil, spray it down the holes, wait a few hours for it to penetrate, loosen the plugs CAREFULLY (a little at a time, spraying more oil down there as you are doing it), and replace.
You really REALLY need to get the codes read to find out what's going on. It could be anything, and after doing all that work, it would SUCK to find out it didn't help.
Before you get to carried away replace your boots and check the plug torque or replace the plugs. I just changed all of my boots and they where no longer sealing where they went into the head letting moisture in causing a random misfire. Truck runs like new again . Remember rubber doesn't last forever either time or mileage will get to it. I bought mine for $4.58 each at NAPA.
I had the same issue. I replaced the spark plugs and put EBay coils ($104). The coils fixed my issue (120k miles).
A little food for thought; When you replace all our coils they also come with new boots so you don't know if it was coils or boots. A feeeeew years back you could check plug wires by turning off the lights or finding some unknowing unsuspecting person to grab on to then and see if they stat jumping around . Now that you can't see them anymore you have to guess, but form experience a random miss is caused by bad wires/boots or plugs.
Well, I was driving the truck last Tuesday going to pick up my daughter from camp and it just started running REAL rough. When I pulled in and stopped, it sounded like the thing had a big cam in it ....so, I guess at this point, it's totally dropped out to 9 or maybe even 8 cylinders. New accel coils and motorcraft platinum plugs will be in soon, everything is getting replaced!
Update: I got the coils off and the plugs out. The coils "look" good (no visible cracks, no signs of carbon in the boots), the boots looked fine. I tested the resistance with an ohm meter and all were 0.5-1.0 ohms, which I believe is within spec. I'm going to gap the Motorcraft sp-479 (i.e agsf22wm) plugs to 0.54 and reinstall them tomorrow. Hopefully the truck will be running by Sunday afternoon (I'm REALLY taking my time here...which is SO unlike me!).
Mark
Well, today I got the new coils and plugs in, everything is buttoned up correctly. I started up the truck...and it's still running like crap. It seems to rev smoothly, but it idles like a big-block with a giant cam in it (very lopey).....not exactly what I was hoping for.
So, assuming this thing will eventually throw a damn code...how long do I have to drive around with it like this to get it to tell me something???