I have an opportunity to buy a fleet truck from the company I work for. It is a 1999 f-250 super duty, crew cab, long box, srw. It has the 7.3 diesel with a 6 speed manual transmission. It has 117000 miles on it, and has had the oil changed religiously every 3000 miles. It has been well used, and sometimes abused, but overall it has been well taken care of for a fleet vehicle. After reading about the common problems of a poor sealing air box, I had a closer look at this one and found plenty of dust bypassing the filter.

Photo of the air intake box showing dust bypassing the filter.

Photos of the CCV inlet, showing oil mist mixing with dust and collecting on walls.

Turbo compressor looks not too bad, a few small nicks in some of the fins.

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The engine doesn’t burn any significant amount of oil (maybe half a litre between oil changes), doesn’t blow smoke, starts and runs really well hot or cold. The turbo shaft has a very small amount of side to side and up and down play, but no in and out play. It spins nice and free. My question is; should I be concerned enough about this “dusting” to avoid buying the vehicle? I want to use it as a utility vehicle, not a daily driver. Home reno’s, hauling junk to the summer cabin, towing light trailer (<6000lbs). I will probably put less than 3000 miles a year on it. Given the purchase price (under $3000), I don’t mind if it’s a bit down on power, or will only last until 250k miles instead of 350k miles. However, I don’t want to buy something that’s going to wheeze and die within a few months. Should I clean out the intake tubes, throw in a new air filter, buy it, drive it, and be happy? Or run away screaming?

 

WOW! You've got some major issues there. If I were you I would start figuring out what intake you want to replace that thing with. I run the 6637 along with many on this site. Cost is $30 from fleetfilter plus shipping. I believe they call it part # 46637.

With that much dusting I would also call blackstone labs and order one of their oil analysis kits and have it sent off. They will break it down and be able to tell you of any contaminents in your oil. I haven't done this yet but plan on it.

I see you haven't bought this yet. Unless you are getting a screaming deal I would keep looking.

 

Well Im no engineer but I can see that its been sucking dust, all the fins are worn from it. Dust is not good. Im sure others will jump on with more details as to why.
And welcome to FTE bro
Look what happened to poor ccg711
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utMmX1mth7E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZUlJ_dLN-k&NR=1
part two you can see his compression wheel

 

I'm no expert, but I would choose (A) buy it and swap air cleaners. You could have a compression test done, I think that would tell you if dust did any cylinder damage. Under $3000 is an awesome deal. Go For It!

 

Under $3k is a decent price. I didn't see that before, small print and all J/K. I would deffinately dump the stock box and go with 6637 filter though.

 

Under $3000 is a good price point. Your turbo play is normal so you should be good there. If you can, take a picture of the compressor fins a little close so we can see if it has been eaten up. Switch to a 6637 or a S&B and junk that stock box. I think for that price you can't go wrong. How is everything else? Leaking oil in the valley or anything?

BTW - Welcome to FTE

 

Price is good but check out the links someone posted above for my horror story. I bought mine cheap as well, and they didn't even have it in a cranking condition when I bought mine (foolish me). Both me and and Kwik here have videos detailing 99 year trucks and the amount of blowby out the oil cap. Mine's the worst one of the two in quality and I suggest kwik's for a good idea of what blowby is suppose to be like. Ford manual doesn't list a compression test to check cylinder wear, they measure blowby from the cap, which can be done by eye once you know what you're looking for. I have a whole slew of videos detailing what can go wrong when dusting is not kept in check. My suggestion is check it over as much as possible, blackstone if you have the time, eyeball the blowby, and have a third party mechanic or yourself do a compression check, as well as a computer diagnostic called a cylinder contribution test. Unlike gassers, our computer systems don't keep track of misfires since there's too much vibration in the engine. Anyone here that can volunteer an AE scan system, or a mechanic with a GOOD code reader can run this test, and possibly check cylinder rotational velocities. My research into the topic of dusted 7.3 powerstrokes leads me to believe that number 5 and 7 (the same one's on my engine, the two passenger side rear) are the most likely to fail first from dusting. If you're lucky you can get away with a turbo rebuild kit from ebay which includes a new wheel for around $170 which is part of what I did for my turbo. He will even balance it for you, and I suggest you take him up on it. I had to buy a new turbine shaft as well for mine and sent all new parts for balancing, and they came back with bits ground away, showing that they did indeed need it despite being new. I believe the minimum compression for these engines is 300PSI and the upper end is 4xx (i can't find my manual with the numbers). The turbo is real easy to build assuming you don't have major damage, check out http://guzzle.rbmicro.com/vanturbo.html for details on that. Let me find kwik's video.....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP9UTR_I0dk and then check out http://www.youtube.com/user/ccg711 and http://www.technicalmercenary.com for the horror stories. Don't get too frightened though, just make an informed decision.


EDIT: BTW, mine had 210K on it before it failed catastrophically. I don't know how long my airbox was broke, so at 117K, it might not be in that bad of shape. You just need to be diligent to find out what you can. Long blocks are near $5k and full drop in engines are $7k-10k last time I priced them, which wasn't long ago considering I'm still installing the long block.

Chad

 

Like Chad said, check the blowby first. Then you can make your decision. Rebuilding a turbo isn't too expensive. Rebuilding the engine tends to run the price up a bit.

 

If your blowby seems OK, I don't think you can go too wrong, considering what you will use it for. On the plus side, you know the oil has been changed at 3k, which is more frequently than a lot of them get changed.