Brad Clayton

Gonna be 74 degrees here on Sunday.  

We mounted a Duramax on our Norco stand at school tonight...........geez what a pain in the ass, gong show this was. Them universal adapters can make a monkey out of ya.

My favorite part about it, besides it's two wheel steering, is the swivel hook (we have one also).

Nice engine crane!

I started on mine the night before and had it running the next day, so 10 or 12 hours. There is really no comparison to doing this cab off, it becomes a matter of preference. Do you like to have room to work? Do you only have one bay and can't tie it up with a cab off if parts need to be ordered, ect.

If you are a "flat rate animal" then you will never take a cab off for any reason. I am getting old and tired and I like to have a lot of room, hell I take the cabs off F150's to do valve stem seals. I would have taken the cab off of this truck but I had the chance to see if this job was feasible so I did it in chassis as a test. It is a lot faster but very nerve racking making sure nothing gets damaged. I have done quite a few left heads in chassis before, but I always removed the turbo to do so. This project was to prove out that (in a pinch) the head could be removed with the turbo in place. Kinda like a Duramax. 

Yes indeed it is. I looked at one yesterday and it appears that the back 3 nuts can be accessed from underneath. The next one I get I will try to remove those from the bottom so I can get the manifold out of the truck and thus out of the way.

Sorry, couldn't resist. I have never done one and hope to never do one. But there seems to be a lot of chatter about the pump gear and timing. So I would be very cautious when getting to the point of pressing the gear on and off the pump. It seems that if this part of the operation goes South then you have to pull the whole timing cover to fix it. I don't know just what I have been reading.

Yeah.....change your screen name to "32nomore". 

Gray has some really nice jack equipment you will be pleased with it's many years of performance. 

Could have been just a shit part. I've replaced a few with no issues so I would sweat it.

I don't even bother looking at the existing label, I just look up the codes in IDS, much easier on the eyes and dead on accurate!

I am gonna stick with my original thought way before this was brought up...........the Transit as well as the Transit Connect are the biggest pieces of shites running on the road.

The original hose that can be separated does not have a sensor in it nor is it monitored. If you looked closely at the "sensor" it's empty with no guts or pins.

I have always wondered about the rear crankshaft adapter on these engines. The fact that I have always been told to never remove it or certain death would result, only fueled my curiosity. However, I am pretty lazy, so I never looked too far for answers. I just did what I was told like a good little boy. So I was left to wonder if it was a run out issue that would cause the rear main seal to leak or was it a balance issue or what. 
 
Well, I stumbled across a video put up by Ron Huxell (he passed away recently) dealing with a wicked engine vibration. This ended up coming from the adapter that had been removed and then put back on incorrectly by another shop. This indexed the flywheel in the wrong position and threw the engine balance off due to the big ass weights that are welded to the ring gear assy. They got lucky because the base engine timing can really be affected if using the Ford line up tool on an adapter that is bolted up in the wrong position.
 
So I had a core laying around and decided to experiment......let's take a look.
 
Here we are with an enhanced short block trim.



I've got a Norco so it makes this job easy peasy.



Pop the rear cover off.



So this is the Ford tool and it is a must have if rolling the crank in and out of position and comes in handy for setting the crank in the block.



The length of the tool makes crank/cam alignment pretty straight forward.



If the bolt is installed to hold the tool to the cam then the crank can be tossed in by a blind man and be in time.



However, the tool can be rotated as far as you want as long as the crank pin is still in the tool and everything will be in time when rotated back to vertical.



Both marks will be at 12 O Clock when timed, but I would not want trust an eyeball method.



Different perspective.



Adapter removal.



She is on pretty tight, but a basic puller will pop it off.



A look underneath.



The problem with the adapter is it can be bolted back on in six separate positions, but only one is the correct position. The red arrow points at a nice little place for a pin to line up with, yet the crank gear does not have a pin. The cam and crank are easily aligned with no tools because the dots go together (yellow line). So once the cam is in, then the adapter can be put on and the existing pin will be at 12 O Clock. The Ford tool can be installed to verify this and the adapter can be bolted down. But to also note, the hole in the adapter (red arrow) goes 180 degrees across from the key (green arrow) on the crank gear. Easy right?



At this point I just pulled all the lifters to there max stroke with a magnet to clear the cam lobes.



Rather difficult for me to pull the cam and take a picture so I enlisted a helper.



I think back to all the cams I have replaced and wished I had tried this earlier.



Upon reassembly, this tool erases all doubt as to whether it's timed correctly or not.



So that's it. This truck had a ruint lifter which ate at the cam lobe. The customer opted for a short block, but I would have just put a cam and lifters in it personally. The engine was in good shape otherwise and had low miles.

Oh man, I apologize, I haven't done one in so long I don't even want to guess as I can't remember. I know it's not backing off and doing a full whack like Mike listed, though.

I don't think it is an under torque issue, and I spoke with an engineer at the assembly plant back in 1999 when this issue first cropped up. He told me it was an impurity issue with some loose metal particles interfering with the gasket sealing.

Maybe re-torquing crushes everything down a bit, kinda like cranking down on a brake caliper banjo bolt to seal a leak?

When I was in SC, we put head gaskets on them and pulled the cabs to do it, super easy job

When I was in VT, we pulled the valve covers and retorqued the heads with quite amazing results, I was skeptical the first one out.

Diesel

Well, Ford came out and picked up our '17 Super-Duty and hauled it away Friday. Still can't get an answer as to what is going on.

Target practice, insert favorite service manager's picture where red dot is.

I have had guys never fix the issue and just kept on trucking. I wouldn't break my bank account trying to fix it.

yep

Ford emailed my dealer this morning and instructed us to pull our '17 model off the line and not to show or sale this vehicle to anyone.

You guys know anything about this? Nobody here has a clue as to why.

If it only does it at idle and lessens when revving then put a torque converter in it. The 7.3's were bad about that noise. There was a TSB, I think.