Been having some injector problems (pretty sure). It runs a little rough until the tranny hits 125 degrees. Started about 800 miles ago, used the big bottle of Lucas oil injector cleaner thoughtout about 300 miles and it started running nice and clean, although it was still a little rough warming up. I thought it could also be that my truck is tuned so I took the tune off and it still runs rough until warmed up. So now I bought the hotshot injector cleaner and I haven't even used more than 1/8th of a tank. Just now I was pulling out of a stop light and saw a little poof of white smoke and it did that for the next 5 stop-go's. So I thought that the the hotshot cleaner hasn't hit my injectors yet possibly because it hasn't been driven?? So I drove it around about 20 miles putting the pedal down fast and started to see more black poofs of smoke (not much smoke it's set to stock tune/also stock injectors). So what do you guys think? Add more injector cleaner? drive it harder to get the cleaner to my injectors? I really don't want to drop a bunch of cash on this truck. Also I usually give it 10 minutes to warm up everyday and I usually drive less than 5-10 miles is that bad?

 

Do you have anyway of monitoring diagnostic codes? Look for misifire counts or cylinder contribution codes.
Injector cleaner can help. But in my experience it is fleeting.

 

You probably will need injectors, but first get something to monitor live data as stated above, then give Archoil 9100 a try HSS did very little for my '03, Archoil cleaned them up well enough that I was able to get 3 more years out of them. When the time comes for injectors I would use ONLY Ford OEM remans, they seem to have the best reputation, if you want bigger injectors have them built on fresh OEM's.

 

Injectors are $400 a pop just for the part, so if you want to not spend a lot of money guessing on swapping out hard parts, call a Ford dealer and get the service writer to quote you what an hour of diagnostic time for their diesel guy to hook IDS to the truck and run some of the tests would be. Uncompensated balance test will pretty well show if some/all are low or not.

 

if you know where to look you can find Ford Remans for a little over $200 ea.

 

I didn't include the $180 core charge typical from Form for a reman, that was my-b typing too fast. White Bear has them for $203+180 core.

Any way you slice it a $110-160 charge for an hour of shop time for diagnostics is cheaper than swapping sticks on a hunch. IIRC flag time was roughly 2.5 hours for the first hole per side, and another quarter hour for each additional hole. So all 8 injectors is 7.5 hours labor plus parts prices. Say you score a $100/hr rate at a decent shop, you're at $750 for labor, plus $1,600 in injectors, plus a incidentals like seal kits. I not going to drop something in the range of $2,500 on a guess when IDS will do a decent job at spitting out the answer.