forddieseldoctor

I don't really care what people do to their trucks once they are out of warranty, but I did get burned by a programer on a 6.4 the other day. Guy towed it in cause the throttle pedal would become unresponsive and the truck would idle at 1300 rpms. He told me that it had a delete kit and a programmer. The guy owns a body shop that does some mechanical work. The truck had been to at least one maybe two other shops and all they did was throw an accelerator pedal and tell him that his ebp sensor had codes, "but wasn't an issue". I pulled codes, had a ebp code, and a vref B high code. Cleared them out and took it for a ride. Truck ran beautifully except that they ebp_A pid was reading right around 40 psi all the time. Went back to the shop, did the pinpoint test to verify a bad sensor, plugged it back in and the sensor was reading normal. Replaced the sensor and tube, and my shop drove the truck about 40 miles and the throttle never acted up and the codes never came back. Guy took the truck, paid the bill. Called about 3 days later, the throttle went dead once for him the other night. He drove the truck back in, I hopped in it with the IDS and grabbed the dpf pressure and temp pids. Found that with foot on the brake I was reading 0.4 volts and with foot off the brake I had 4.8 volts. Managed to find that they vref wire for the dpf sensor was broken and shorting to the right turn for the trailer tow back by the front fuel tank strap. Once I found the dpf reading so weird I pulled out the programmer. By the time I found the wires I had a code set for dpf pressure sensor intermittent. If I had pulled the program out right away the first time I would have had that code in a matter of minutes instead of wasting 2 hours investigating the throttle circuit and chasing wires.

We got 2 other VCM II's and they work wonderfully with the wireless. Except for ficm testing on a cold 6.0 or anything else with a super weak battery on cold start. I'm gonna have to look and see if I can find the reset button. Don't recall there being one.

Shop bought another VCMII this week so now everyone has their own. New one shows up, they hand it to me and say make it work. So I plug it in and let it update/activate. Didn't bother to try the wireless part of it, threw it in the IDS cabinet. The guy who is supposed to be using it grabs it and uses it wirelessly and he said that the first two times he tried it kept telling him to turn the key on, but on the third try it worked and he did what he had to do. The next time he used it he got the same crap, except this time he whined about it. I took a quick glance at it and told him to try it with the cable. It works perfectly with the cable and he does what he has to do. I tried it after he was done with it and I go the same message about turning the key on, tried a different wireless adapter, still same message, grabbed the VCMII that I always use and it works perfectly with the wireless. Service manager walks by and I hand the new VCM to him, explain what it's not doing, he goes and starts to deal with trying to get it warrantied. He comes back out about 10 minutes later and hands me a sheet with VCM self test directions on it. So after work I plug the bad vcm in and figured I'd quick run the self test and see what's going on. The one in the VCM manager outside of IDS ran and said no issues. I fired up IDS and told it to run the self test in the troubleshooting tab. It launched into some test with a blue bar scrolling across the screen, I got sick of waiting for it after 10 minutes and I had some parts to go pick up, So I left and came back almost an hour after I started the self test and it's still thinking hadn't changed one bit from where I left it, at this point I unplugged the VCM and turned off the laptop and went home. Anyone ever run that test for the VCM II's? I'm thinking that it froze and that it's not supposed to take that long to run. Any thoughts?

I've never had it bad enough that I was loosing sleep. But I wasn't sad to say good-bye to my last dealership. And no matter what if you work with other people they will do stuff that pisses you off. I've been at my current dealer for 5 years and there's days when I want to kick my co-workers in the teeth. But I've started wearing ear plugs whenever I pick up a air tool or mount tires and I've noticed that if I can't hear them I'm much happier.

The only issues I've had is a 6.0 short block that threw a rod about 3 years after I put it in.

Hmm. Never seen green gaskets on an oil cooler. But they show the green gaskets in the pictures of the dorman coolers.

Set a dounut about 3 feet away from him and when he gets up steal his chair.

There's an ecoboost F-150 sitting at another local dealership that is missing half of one of the cam shafts due to lack of maintence to the tune of 30K miles on the factory oil and filter. They guy is crying warranty (of course). People whine like hell when stuff breaks cause THEY DON'T TAKE CARE OF IT. But crappy "techicians" don't help anything either. I'm not gonna say I'm perfect cause I'm far from it, but I'd say that about half of the asset students are a joke and always will be. I saw one of my co-workers put an intake manifold on a 4.2 in a F-150 and then it came back about 2500 miles later for a burning oil smell. I found the center gasket hanging out from under the back of the intake at a 45 degree angle. Oh but it wasn't his fault. It was almost 3000 miles since he worked on it and my service manager don't have the balls to tell him that he screwed up.

Sounds like all of my co-workers.

We've had a couple of those. Manegement makes us clean them by soaking them in a sink and then flushing with a hose.