Made a trip to New Orleans from Tennessee, drove the X everyday, drove back to TN, and the next morning the expansion tank cap had relieved and now there is water and oil in my coolant system, oil is about 4 Quarts low. Does anyone know of someone that does good work for a reasonable price?? I am a mechanic by trade on big diesels, but numerous people have told me that the 6.0 (2004 Eddie Bower edition) troublesome and will never be the same. Should I do this myself or get a professional to do it? Any advice or opinions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Since you are a diesel mechanic by trade and assuming you have access to tools/work bay/etc I would tackle the project yourself.

I had my 05 6L done under warranty, but the work can be DIY for sure.

One thing I recommend is draining the drivers side block drain plug then lower radiator hose into a 5 gallon bucket. check out the sediment. That casting sand and gunk is what caused the issues. Its everywhere there is coolant and gets trapped in the radiator/egr cooler/oil cooler/ and heater core.
That sediment is why swapping out one part can work for awhile (you hear a lot about new oil coolers clogging just like the first) cleaning out the sediment and installing a coolant filter helps.

The parts I would recommend are.
1. EGR cooler delete, or one of the egr coolers with larger passages
2. New oem oil cooler
3. Oem head gaskets
4. ARP head studs
5. Coolant filter
6. Gauges to monitor engine oil temp and coolant temp
7. Back flush radiator, heater core, and engine coolant passages.
8. Fill with motorcraft coolant (not the green stuff)

Also, heads are often cracked. Both mine were. So get them cleaned and inspected. Its worth the cost of doing it right once.

 

Gonna move this over to the 6.0L PSD forum where the pro's can walk you through this step-by-step and get you back on the road.

Stewart

 

Where in Tennessee are you?

 

With what you're saying there it sounds like you've got a blown oil cooler. Bigdaddy's got a good bulletproofing list for you if you only want to dive into it once, but your issue now sounds like a bad oil cooler.

When they rupture (usually after being clogged for many miles), the oil is under higher pressure than the coolant so you'll get that nasty oil in your coolant system. If you have an EGR cooler still on the truck, there's a good chance it got starved of coolant as well and the brazed joints failed (noot 100%, but a good chance). At the very least, I'd recommend a full coolant flush and a new oil cooler and EGR cooler and that should take care of your problems for now. A coolant filter and good coolant maintenance will help to keep this issue from recurring.

IMO the 6.0 is misunderstood. It's really not that hard to work on and you can get it back to great shape! It takes some attention to detail and some patience but if you're a mech. already by trade you should be fine.

 

Thanks for all your responses, I am sorry I did not answer sooner, but I have been extremely busy with job and X. What pressure am I using to check my oil cooler? My torque #40 also seems small for the bolt in the filter base, anyone know the size? Thanks again, I am talking all options over with my financial manager (wife).

 

Please give me some guidance on where are some accessible ports to put my oil and coolant temp gauges. So I should go through Ford for my parts and not Rock Auto?

 

Just dont buy anything from dorman! Rockauto somtimes has motorcraft stuff. But try tousley ford for parts. Thats the best source for cheap motorcraft parts.

 

Get a ScanGauge II theyre less than $200. They sell them at autozone (I bought mine there) or you can order one off of amazon or ebay. The oil and coolant (called water on the SGII) temps are standard gauges but they are really good for 6.0 equipped vehicles because they have what they call "X-Gauges" which are gauges you can manually install by entering codes and having it plugged in to your vehicle. those include things like FICM voltage, ICP, IPR, etc you can look more on that. Best $175 I ever spent. even includes Velcro to stick to your dash.

 

There are already coolent and oil temp sensors, just need to plug into the OBD2 port and check'm. I'm to assume you have some sort of engine diagnostic tool? If not, at the very least you will really like having a scanguageII to check the live data.

The other piece that you will need to get squared away is getting that oil out of the coolent. I will assume that you know about running some simple green thought the cooling system.

Edit: keep in mind that you are miles ahead of the rest of shade tree guys, you already are a diesel mechanic. So, you should be golden to get this project wrapped up. At the very least there are a couple of videos on YouTube showing some steps to getting this done.