I've been a lurker here for years and read the heck out of this forum before purchasing my Ex. It's a 2004 Eddie Bauer 4X4 with the 6.0. I'm the second owner and purchased it off of Ebay June of 2014 in showroom condition with only 39,000 miles on it.

I immediately had my local Ford Dealer change all the fluids and filters since I wasn't certain how current the maintenance was. The dealer offered a Ford bumper-to-bumper extended warranty for $2,400 (up to 75K mi/4 yrs) and I took them up on it.

Over the next two years, the warranty did pay for itself and then some. It paid for a new turn signal switch, replacement of all the bump stops and a new oil cooler (temp delta was about 17 degrees)and few other smaller items.

We took quite a few road trips and it now has 81K miles and still looks beautiful...my wife thinks we should keep it forever! Throughout that time I've kept current on the maintenance as well as having the oil changed every 4K miles.

The latest saga is that my oldest son took it on a hiking trip in west Texas and on the return trip called to tell me it started smoking and making a rattling engine noise. Since he was a ways from any city I told him to watch the oil pressure and see if he could get it into the nearest town.

About 5 minutes later he called to say it blew something and created a black smoke screen that momentarily shut down the interstate. It would still run, but he shut it off nonetheless and called for a flatbed.

It ended up at the Ford dealer in Midland Texas and they ran diagnostics on it and said it had one cylinder down and the crankcase had a lot of diesel in the oil...plus, raw diesel coming out the exhaust.

I could either have them do a teardown, or do a replacement engine for $16K. I decided to have it towed back to Dallas to my dealer for a second opinion.

Long story short (too late?), the second opinion was the same as the first. It probably had an injector fail and flooded a cylinder and now probably had either connecting rod damage or scored walls, the only way to know for sure would be to start a teardown to find out how bad the damage was.

I decided to get the engine replaced...it would come with the long block assembly and new injectors, glow plugs and EGR cooler, etc. Three weeks later I'm back on the road with a new engine and a 2 year warranty and $16,200 less in the bank. Yeah, kind of wished it had failed a little earlier so my extended warranty would've covered it.

I'm not sure what I could've to prevent this, or if the fuel injector was even the actual problem...and ideas?


JohnE

 

That sucks, hind sight is 20-20. Without a real 6.0 tech and digital gauges it's a guess

 

Your extended warranty probably would not have covered it anyway. When I read the fine print in every extended warranty I've seen, it did not cover injectors or damage caused by them.

It is hard to say for sure what caused it and how much damage it did without at least running a boroscope down into the low cylinder and doing some investigating. A friend of mine was doing 75 mph on the highway when his 04 6.0 actually locked up dead from an injector sticking open and hydrolocking. He changed the injector and drove the truck without any problems for another 50k before trading it in.

 

Man that's awful. I was struggling paying to get my headgaskets replaced and studded, let alone replace the whole thing. Well done!

 

That sucks man. I just did a rebuild and it cost me $11k. I was over 330k though; it really sucks to have had to do that repair before 100k.

 

Yeah, I was hoping to go close to 200k before doing head gaskets or worse, but it's a crapshoot with these motors sometimes.

 

If you got a 4 year 75k warranty, what, 50k and 3 years ago, why didn't warranty cover it? I didn't follow that part.

That's ridiculous, that's actually what a higher mile 6.0 in decent shape might cost private party!

Mine has 170k, it had 5k in studs, egr delete, oil cooler, and ficm done at 120 and just got 3k of new injectors at the ford dealership and $1500 of work in the front differential and I was thinking I'd dumped a lot of money in mine!

 

I had no idea it cost that much, does the new 6.0 come studded already? Or do you still need to do any mods?

 

The new 6.0 isn't studded, it's a replacement stock motor from Ford.

 

Warranty did not cover it because the warranty only went out to 75,000 miles on the vehicle. Since the vehicle was at 81,000 miles, warranty had expired 6000 miles ago.

 

What would a low mileage used motor have run? I'm sure a reputable junk yard would have given some kind of warranty on it. I can't even begin to fathom laying out that kind of money on a 13 year old vehicle.

For that kind of money, I think I would have pressured the dealer into trying to determine the cause in order to try and prevent it from happening again. No chance you son was out hot rodding it or anything like that?

 

The Ford extended warranty they offered me on mine (04 bought in 2010 with 59k) excluded "accessories" defined as anything bolt to the engine but not contained between the head gasket mating surface of the block and oil pan mating surface... Specifically excluded blown headgaskets, emissions equipment, cracked heads, etc. Odd warranty to me in that if you caught a problem before it blew the engine, you'd be just as well off driving down the road till you finally make a 9th bore so the warranty would at least cover something.

 

OK I get it, thought you meant coverage extended an additional 75k.

 

Sorry to hear that! Glad you got it fixed though.
And I always laugh when people say a diesel doesn't cost as much to maintain as a gas motor! Ughhh!

 

Ah come on, most 6L owners never will have this issue.

If the owner now has this engine/excursion run for 14 more years without problem, it would be a great investment.