That’s great to hear! No crate engine needed, cam chain timing no big hardship?

Have you replaced the cats, and have you towed with it yet?

You sounded very disgusted with it earlier, but worked through it! Great Job!

 

Haven't quite got it to where I am ready to tow with it. It had a ~1000lb service canopy on the back that I had to get removed with a forklift, and then since it had no tailgate I've had to basically rebuild a new tailgate (done, for the most part, except for a couple of trim bits and a new coat of paint). I fixed the coolant leak -- I had kinda messed up the thermostat housing O-ring, so I bought a new O-ring and thermostat to boot (no reason to think it was bad, but this WAS a 175k mile truck) and now there's no leak, no overheat, no issues there.

There IS an intermittent code that's vexing me -- P219a (fuel/air imbalance, bank 1). It can take weeks to return after I clear it. The truck *runs* fine and there are basically 0 misfires, so I'm not *too* worried, but I'm a perfectionist and I don't want the thing broken down by the side of the road. I intentionally DIDN'T get a turbodiesel because of that, despite their higher towing cap.

Doing some research, these are my possible causes for the P219a:

• the coolant leaking was running down the block saddle, down the driver's side exhaust, and dripping off near/at the cats. It's possible the rear O2 sensor got bathed in coolant. I thought it was fixed after I fixed the coolant leak, but it just came back yesterday. Still runs fine. So maybe the coolant caused some kind of permanent intermittent damage to that rear O2 sensor? I have no problems replacing it (again!) but I'm getting tired of parts darts, y'know?
• when I replaced the exhaust to undelete the cats, I got "clever" and since I couldn't find a replacement heat shield for the downpipes, I just used turbo/lava rock pipe wrap on it. Sure, the underside of my truck isn't catching fire, but I wonder if that's not throwing off the heat balance -- IE, so much more heat is going down into the cats rather than radiating from the downpipes that it's throwing off the mixture readings? I'm happy to call it a fail and remove the wraps but I don't know how to source the heat shields. Ford wants you to buy an entire exhaust system, of course, and I still haven't found junk yards in my area with my year/model of truck. Maybe some other brand/year would work?
• maybe my aftermarket Magnaflow factory-replacement cat-back isn't performing up to spec? I mean it LOOKS fine and fits like a glove, but who knows...
• maybe my K&N cold air intake is mucking up the mixture?
• maybe my aftermarket MAF sensor isn't working right (although again, the truck *runs* perfectly)

If it's not one of these things, I'm back to playing parts darts. I *do* have a ForScan setup, so I can see detailed info on fuel trims etc., but I honestly don't know what I'm looking for -- any deep diagnostics savvy folks on these forums?

 

Oh, and: the tow wiring harness is borked, so I'll have to rewire that before I can tow. But that's so minor I've been putting it off (plus vehicle wiring is such a pain in the ***...)

 

Now that I think about it: *is* bank 1 on the driver's side? Or would that be passenger, where the #1 cylinder is?

 

Passenger is #1 with Ford. If the O2 sensors check out maybe diagnose the injectors. There are cheap tools that can pulse them and check for leakdown. Reading fuel pressure is tricky on this engine, you need a tee for a gauge (or maybe the obd2 parameter is accurate enough).
MAF issues (in my experience) affect both banks. The explorer I have had a sensor that would sometimes fall asleep for a bit on long trips and trigger a code. Then it would wake back up.

 

Old thread, I know - but do you have any updates?

 

Any updates?