TLDR: I am missing injector 4 & 8 I believe, do I need to buy an AD & an AE to get it back to a running state?

My 7.3 has sat for a few years now.. and I have finally decided it’s time to try and get it fired back up and see if I can limp it to a shop to take a look at it. A handful of years back I was driving it and heard a sort of pop from up front, truck died on me and I couldn’t get it restarted for a few days, I got a buddy to tow me home where I started changing out sensors and things that googling lead me to believe were bad.. I believe what ended up getting it fired up again was changing the IPR, after it fired though it ran like garbage blowing white smoke.. more googling and my lack of knowledge led me to believe it was injectors, at this point I limped it down to a local shop/family friend. Told him what happened and sure enough he did an injector test and found two bad ones..4&8 I believe.. he ordered two new ones,(yeah I should’ve done the set, but was broke) sent the cores back and got the truck running again, he said the truck was running just fine, so he took it for a test spin and made it about 10 miles out of town and heard a pop, similar to what I described to him, and it started running like crap and blowing white smoke.. he limped it back to the shop, did a compression test and told me there was no compression in the engine.. asked if he wanted me to have him further diagnose it or not and being I was short on money I told him to leave it be for now.. he took the new injectors and used them elsewhere and just charged me the cost to work.. I eventually towed it home and it has sat since then.. a lot has happened since then, and most recently a flood took out the place I was living.. so now I’ve been working to get all my old projects somewhat taken care of..this truck being one of them, since I am missing two injectors I figured I could start there and get it at least in a running state, and then take it to a shop, or maybe try and diagnose it myself with the help of everyone here and friends. Don’t want to bring it to a shop without those injectors and it somewhat running.. I checked the two remaining injectors on the drivers side, they both have AD1831551c1 on them.. did some googling around and see that number 8 injector at some point was supposed to be swapped to a AE or manufactured with it, so should I be looking at buying one used AD, and one used AE? I’m just looking around on eBay to try and find some cheap options to get me by and go from there.

 

You can go with two AD injectors, or if you want, find an AE to stick in the #8 hole. The AE is just a long lead injector made to cut down on some noise. It's not needed.

But your problem never was injectors. The truck will still run with 6 injectors, but have a noticeable miss. Not sure what the pop was, but a bad turbo can cause low power and a bunch of white smoke.

But if he did a compression check and it failed, then you may have something more serious going on.

 

Thanks for the reply, I didn’t even think of doing that. I was afraid without any injectors where injectors were supposed to be something bad could happen, so I didn’t even attempt it. But, I’ll probably still get a couple in there to do it.. I’ll poke around on eBay and see if I can find both, or just two AD’s whichever is cheaper and easier to get me by.. and then probably end up loading it on a trailer and taking it to the shop.. might throw a scanner on there for ****s and giggles to see if it’s throwing any codes that could point me in the right direction. Gonna have the guy diagnose it to start with, or attempt to, and then see if I wanna try and rebuild or what to do next.

 

Check your boots. Generally a loud pop is blowing a cac boot and you'll immediately drop any boost. Laggy, no power, smoke, etc.

Also worth mentioning would be any test for injectors will show 8 as a fail, unless it's a high ender.

Ask around this forum, some guys have them laying around (injectors) and will give or lend them to you to get you into a better position determining what is wrong.

How exactly did your guy concede that you failed a compression test. What were the cylindrical readings across the board and how did he go about it.

You can charge your batteries, pull the oil fill cap and have someone crank it over after you have the injectors in place. Place your palm on the oil fill and if it pops your hand off, you have a compression issue. If not. Go forward.

Denny

 

Okay I’ll check those boots when I start playing with it again, I’ve got my Ranger tore apart right now and am waiting for a couple parts to come in tomorrow and hopefully have it up and going, then will have more time to play with the 7.3

Interesting, I’m curious if my guy knew that or not, he was more of an alignment shop than anything else, just had been a certified ford mechanic for forever and yada yada. No way to tell now if he botched that part up.

I will do that, thanks for the idea, could be a better alternative than hoping things work out from an eBay post.

Honestly I can’t remember the slightest how he came about that I had no compression, I just remember him saying I had no compression and it could be a number of things. Once I get a couple injectors rounded up I’ll do that test with the oil fill. Wish I could’ve/would’ve got to it quicker after all of that happened to at least have things of what I tried, and the mechanic did a little fresher in my head.

 

For a compression test just move the injectors over for that cylinder. If all is good all the way around, buy new ones, or rebuilt. There is a core charge. I guess I didn't read, who has your two injectors?

 

The two missing were from when a mechanic slapped a couple new ones in there and then sent the bad ones in as cores, then pulled and reused the new ones somewhere else cause I didn’t have the money to continue work at the time.

 

I don't mean to step on Chris' toes, and I could be wrong, because Chris has forgotten more about these trucks than I will ever know,-but don't try and run this truck without injectors in those holes. I BELIEVE he meant to say that these trucks will run on 6 good injectors, if 2 were bad, and still in their respective holes. If you run them with nothing in the holes, I feel like that would be bad.

 

What Jason said. Then the mechanic owes you, at least for the cores.

 

Understood, I appreciate the clarification, was gonna attempt to get a couple rounded up before I tried anything anyways, have my other project to keep me busy for now

 

Yeah, in a normal situation I would try and get that, but, this all happened 5 if not more years ago, and plus was a family friend type of situation where I left the truck down at the shop for storage for a long time, and bla bla bla other back story stuff.