on december 17th I bought a 2001 ford ranger edge with the 4.0 v6 sohc 4x4. on christmas eve I lost power while climbing basic hills in Iowa. Nothing to rough or out of the ordinary just normal street driving.

so far only repairs that I have done is replace the fuel filter and add a bottle of injector cleaner. these two repairs were done since I known that the truck sat a year without being driven.

symptons of this problem:
rough idle (idles under 1k rpm)
jerky starts
weak acceleration
"bucking" on hills (normal driving, to much snow to have fun yet)

up until this point the vehicle drove well these symptons appeared litterally just driving down the road.

taking it to the shop is not going to help alot since the battery was disconnected after the error code was thrown. so that is lost from the computer's RAM. Even with the rough running engine the computer is not throwing an error code. checking gages the engine temp (which never gotten hot) is within normal running temp, oil pressure and battery life are all reading within acceptable ranges.

Any ideas what might be wrong would be appreciated to help myself and my mechanic come to a conclusion on what is wrong sooner.

 

also to add to this one....

I don't feel that it would be the cold that is adding to this as the truck started fine in -10 degree weather. This is a contributing factor in why the valence is broken on my new pickup.

The pickup is cranking properly as it is starting, according to some persons that I have talked to they feel that it is either a mass air flow issue. Not sure what that is, or an O2 sensor or a dozen of them going wrong. Others feel that it is a batch of poor quality fuel. If thats the case time to stop paying slightly less for ethanol blended fuels.

 

Hey there moicein, welcome to FTE, this is a great site. You might also want to search this problem in the Ranger forum. The posts there seem to be viewed at a higher rate there IMO. There is a member on that forum named Rockledge that had a problem like that and it turned out to be a loose lower intake manifold. You say the temperature never got HOT, but what is the water level in the radiator like. If it is low, it might point to a leaky intake gasket. You are on the right track with the MAF sensor, if you don't know how to there should be a tech note in the Ranger forum to clean it. Don't forget to check for vacuum leaks and obstructions in the air box. You also need to check for fuel delivery problems. You said the truck sat for a year, has the gas in the tank that sat all year been run through the engine, or are you still running that tank?

Good luck

 

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If the problem is indeed the MAF or the O2 sensor then the computer would be throwing codes related to those items. Have you checked it with a code scanner, or are you assuming there are no codes since the CEL (Check Engine Light) isn't coming on? Not all error codes will trigger the CEL, and they are stored very quickly when there's a problem.

If there are indeed no codes then it occurs to me to check the fuel pressure, as the regulator could be bad or you could have a lot of crud in the system that plugged up the new filter already. How much gas was in the tank while it sat for that year? It could have gone bad and caused your problems.

Wouldn't hurt to take a look at the MAF and clean it, and pull the intake hose and look in the throttle body for excessive build-up of black crud.

 

this morning I took it to the shop that rebuilt the truck and we worked it over there was a code in the comp. for a weak or nonfunctioning MAF sensor so we replaced that

still idling rough after a little dinking around and a mess up with a tool that "listens" to spark through the cable we found that one spark plug cable was loose... kind of strange though when we put the cable on correctly all of the problems seemed to have solved themselves. *kinock on wood*

 

If it continues, pull the IAC and take a look at it. I had a problem with rough idle with my 01. The IAC was filthy. Instead of trying to clean it, I bought a new one (about $50), problem solved.