Have this '04 E250 van with the 6.0 engine that was given to me for parts as the owner didn't want to spend anymore money on it. Like to try and determine what is wrong with it to see if its worth pulling the motor for salvage. Truck has 300k miles on it and worked great up until this happened.

The truck will barely start and when it does only sounds like it is running on a couple of cylinders. Rev it up and it blows lots of white smoke - assuming unburnt fuel. Thinking it must me an injector hopefully just an o-ring. Any thoughts ?

I need to buy a scanner, looked into the torque app, due they make a version for iphones / ipad ? I checked the Iphone app and couldn't find it. Or should I just purchase a scan guage 2 or buy an android tablet and use the torque app ?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

An injector is a reasonable guess but like your thinking, a diagnostic tool will help get you on the right path.

If you have an iPad or iPhone already, the DashBoss works very well DashBoss | A Brain Scan for your Vehicle . It's $169 for the basic set up. If you know your way around your iDevice the learning curve is pretty easy.

ScanGauge II prices are coming down. $128 on Amazon. Very easy to live with if you're looking to leave it in the vehicle. Not a great code reader, but displays important info that is often more helpful than the code. Learning curve is medium, you have to input strings of numbers when you first set it up, and change them if you want to check another type of vehicle.

I have both of those but to be honest my go-to thing (Ford specific) right now is a free windows program called ForScan What's new it works well with a OBDII adapter available from Amazon for less than $25. Hard wired plug or wireless adapters are avaliable.

I haven't used the Torque app but many here like it also.

One more important thing to know- none of these devices will show you low side (crankcase) oil pressure, fuel pressure, or exhaust gas temp. The truck has no sensors for these values so the data isn't available at the OBD plug.

 

IIRC torque is for android and dashboss is for Iphone.

 

The scan gauge is $260 cdn on amazon.ca and the dashboss looks like a good device but it will be over $200 with exchange and shipping.

If I can get a blue tooth reader for $25 that may be the cheapest route. I downloaded the Forscan I'll give it a try.

I have a bullydog / watchdog which works pretty good so I wasn't looking for an in car device.

Extremely helpful. Thank-you.