Hi
Just bought a 94 F250 with a turbodiesel and i have a few questions. We bought it for next to nothing, under the "condition" of the motor being bad. I'm just interested in knowing how bad it really is. It smokes very much bad out of the crankcase breather, but doesn't have a terrible amount of blowby. I have heard about a possibility of bad heads on these motors. Is that a possibility? A compression test has not been done yet. It runs reasonably well. As far as i know, it has about 220K miles. Are we going to be wasing time and money by doing anything other than putting in a reman 7.3? Also, is straightpiping bad for the 7.3, or is backpressure not a concern. Last question: Do i have to remove the injectors to do a compression test on this pig, and if so, how?

Thanks
Steve

 

I'm a little confused. You say it smokes really bad out the crankcase breather but it doesn't have a terrible amount of blow by. How did you arrive at that? The crankcase breather is the CDR valve bolted at the rear of the intake manifold. Put the air cleaner on and start it up with the oil fill cap removed to see how much blow by it has. If it runs pretty good the engine must be in fairly good shape. Does it start all right? If these engines don't get driven enough sometimes the rings will stick in their grooves and cause excessive oil consumption.
The heads have the same problems as any other indirect injected engine.
You can run a compression check using the glow plug holes. There is a fitting that screws down into that hole to hook your compression gauge to. Make sure you disconnect the wires to the injection pump or you'll trash your compression gauge it short order.

 

What kind of trouble does the engine supposedly have? Get us more info and we will tell you what you are looking at. Could be a bad cylinder or just a bad turbo making the smoke. Maybe the injection pump is crapping out. Does it idle smooth? Does it start up without too much effort?

 

First the smoking issue. There is not a lot of air (as in volume) coming out of the breather, but it is quite thick with smoke. It runs smoothly like all cylinders are doing thier work, but starts hard. I did find two glow plugs bad. And I'm fearing one may be stuck, cause the wire was busted off, for who knows how long.

I'll jsut tell you all I know about it I guess. The Ford dealer I bought this from had sold it about 8 months ago. They were not aware of any problems at the time. The purchaser put on 1000 miles in a week, canceled his check, and brought the truck back, saying they could keep thier #$%@& truck. There is now a lawsuit, which involves ford reselling the truck and the former purchaser paying the difference. I don't think ford had the option to fix it and resell it becuase of the lawsuit, orthey probably would have. Nearly everything has been gone thru on the truck, including the tranny. Its solid except for the motor. I figure even putting a motor into it will put me right around 6K$ invested. I know a mechanic that works there that wanted to buy it, but couldn't because of the lawsuit. He was the one that said he might try to get by with jsut heads, and he said there was a coolant leak somewhere he knew, but nobody at ford had really looked into it since they had to sell it as is for the suit. The ring theory could be correct, since it has sat for nearly 8 months without being run. Let me know what other info I can provide you with. Diesels are a new frontier for me.

Steve

 

Steve:
The best place to start is a compression check. Also, if you are willing to do some wrenching, I believe the old engine can be rebuilt for a lot less than $6000 (even if one or both heads need replaced).

 

This motors are faily simple and you can get re ring kits for about 350.00 To check compression and easy way it find a compresion tester that goes up to 500 psi and make an adapter to fit into the glow plug slot.

Let us know what you find out.

Dave