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Oil cooler #3

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Worked late tonight (yes, dammit - again!!!). When I left, sitting outside was oil cooler #3 in less than a month. I think I'm gonna call in sick for the next couple of days...

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I'm into this one now.... they didn't let it run out of oil but they have been adding oil for several days. Gonna be a long time bfore the left side of this truck gets rusty.

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Jim,

 

What are you doing to clean out the cooling systems on these trucks? What soap or chemicals have you found work best and what is your procedure? I have yet to see an oil cooler fail but from what it sounds like there is the likelihood many of us will be seeing this unfortunate failure too! Does Ford pay for the soap and how are you getting paid the unpredictable time to flush the systems?

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Liquid Cascade dish washing detergent works great. I had to do it 5 or 6 times and the coolant bottle looked like a volcano erupting with the mixture of oil and water coming out. if I remember correctly I got paid 2 or 3 hours to flush the cooling system using M time and we charged the Cascade out as a aftermarket part.

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I start the clean up pretty much when I start disassembly. I pull off the degas bottle before I drain the cooling system. Once I have stuff apart, I flush the EGR cooler, heater core and leave the hot water hose drizzle into the rad as I'm working. All of these will get several quarts of oil out of the system.

 

After that it's all MT to fill with water and whatever dishwasher liquid they get me, drive it hard and drain it enough times until the water runs clear. Using the air lift when filling seems to help draw some oil up into the degas.

 

So far, it's been taking about two days to flush the system enough to keep everyone happy. No chargebacks, so far.

 

I'm unsure how they've been charging out the dishwasher liquid. The standing joke around the shop is that I get paid more than any other dishwasher in the world.

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Dale, before I got my first one, one of the other techs had to flush a cooling system left dirty by another dealership. He tried the Motorcraft flush and. while it may be good at reducing scale, it didn't seem to make the flushing process go any faster.

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  • 7 months later...

In a SSM (5065) on today's broadcast messages the recommendation is to use MOTORCRAFT VC-1 COOLANT FLUSH to flush the engine and radiator. I don't know if this is the stuff that you guys think works poorly but I thought I would post it just in case this is new. I seem to remember that we were advised to use a low sudsing detergent like Tide.

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We're back to oil coolers again... I haven't been blessed with one for quite some time but we've seen about four go throiugh the hsop in the past month and two sitting in the back lot.

 

Our current favourite for cleaning the cooling system is Simple Green cleaner. This seems to emulsify the oil much more readily than anything else we've tried.

 

The last cooler replacement only took three of four flushes and came very clean.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I have called the hotline on these & they requested digital photos because if left for too long Ford does not feel you will be able to get block sufficiently cleaned potentially creating hotspots in block. The decisive factor seemed to be the amount of solid sludge from radiator. They made the call but I've done 2 longblock replacements with all new hoses,radiator, & heater core per Ford's instruction. I have to wonder how long these trucks drove like this.

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  • 11 months later...

We finally saw three of these this year. I took some pictures of the last one which was really bad. Believe it or not, we got it cleaned out almost perfectly! I think driving the truck with the detergent in the system was a big factor in flushing out the sludge. The degas bottle had to come off again to remove the sludge that came out of the heater core. I recommend liquid Tide. I believe we drained and filled this system 15 times and it left with no oil in the reservoir. We lost a ton of time though. Warranty really sucks in these situations.

 

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We've only seen one oil cooler failure, actually got so bad that it was like clay in the cylinder heads and black thick chocolate pudding out the lower hose, took about 10 minutes for it all to come out. Of course hotline told us to put a new engine in. Guy slammed service on his survey because he hates the 6.0 product.

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Keith I have replaced long blocks and everything related to the cooling system...heater core, degas bottle, ALL hoses and vatted the radiator to repair these trucks. This is all requested by hot line and prior approval. We have even had inspectors come out for these. I believe we are on about 4 long blocks for sludge that bad. We see about 2-3 a month that are not as bad that we can clean. Seems the 450s and 550s are worse off. must be the weight they are hauling and abuse they go through.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I know this is a bit of an old post but appears to be an ongoing problem. I use calgon and have very good results. I have also used solvent before(I believe it is a zep product but not sure, I can find out if anyone is interested)Than use the soap to get the solvent film out. One thing that helps is we have a dyno and we can heat the engines up really fast. Oil cooler failures suck there is just no good thing about it. I work on heavy duty cat engines most of the time. However they only give us three hours to flush a cooling system no matter how bad it is. What are you gonna do though.

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