GregH

Glad to hear you've made progress! Good luck!

I've got a little program on my flash drive for things like that. It's a group of tools collectively known as Hiren's Tools. Latest version is around 9.8 or so. Find this package off google, follow the install directions to a flash drive or a CD-ROM, and boot to that.

So, I've got this '08 F-550 stakeside that is used by some local business as a hauler for pallets of sod, light farm machinery, and such... At 37,000 miles it came in with an engine misfire. #2 piston was melted, and there was significant metal transfer to the cylinder head. I installed a line engine. At 50,000 miles the vehicle returns. Now it's got a knock and misfire, and it smokes from the tailpipe. Horizontal EGR cooler has failed, and #8 took a big gulp of coolant. Short block goes in. In fact, this is the same truck referenced in an earlier post about it's head bolts chattering while tightening. 55,000 miles, and it's back again. Misfire on 2 and 8. Relative compression shows a double digit drop on those cylinders, and smoke chuffs from the oil fill cap when removed. Cylinder head will probably have to come off next, and a review of the damage present in the cylinders... Now, I know that this truck is run hard by minimum wage twenty year olds. P0297 in memory is a given. Catalyst overtemp codes are also a usual occurence. EGT12 showed 1500 degrees during this last visit. Freeze frame data also shows over 50% APP and a pegged out FRP... Whoever is driving it keeps their foot in it all the time. But, comeon! 5,000 miles between engine failures? This company hasn't even paid for an oil change since 30,000 miles... I've put in more engines than radiators on this truck! As a side note, this truck came back 80 days from the date of the last RO at 50,000 miles for a couple of recalls... How do I know it was exactly 80 days? I casually flipped over to the OASIS report on the back to admire the rap sheet, and was dismayed to find that my short block repair wasn't on the report. When I mentioned that to the service manager, it was met with an "oh, well" attitude. I wrote up my recall and turned it in. An hour later, the manager was frantically scouring the file cabinets. Seems one of the clerks that works at our dealership never submitted the warranty claim... -- Side note to the side note, my dealership backflagged me the .2 to check and verify there was a degas jug tee installed. Granted, I had put it there as part of the same recall when I put in the short block. But without running the RO, the recall never got closed out, and I can't remember accurately what I worked on yesterday, much less what I did almost three months prior. Anyway, the old short block still hasn't been picked up by Fred Jones.. Think I can rob a couple of pistons outa it? Anyone else having this kind of luck with these engines?

I don't think regularly greasing sealed bearings would prolong their life. The old grease doesn't go anywhere, so you are mixing old and new grease. As for bearings failures, I see them pretty regularly. I don't think I've seen many trucks over about 150,000 miles that haven't had at lease one bearing replaced....

Given the fact that the maximum altitude achieved during the ballistic portion of the video appears to be equal to or greater than the starting point, and the fact that the person/pilot/projectile is decelerated from a fairly high velocity down to zero within the diameter of the wading pool with no apparent damage to the pool, I will have to vote for fake. A well done fake, but fake nonetheless.

I would suggest building this simple circuit, and splicing it in across the brake lamp switch. All solid state, no excessive current load from turning on a relay, and it can be made with an exceedingly small footprint. The resistor is a 10KOhm, and available at radio shack. Cheapest one you can find is fine - the current flow through the resistor when active will be almost unmeasurable. The transistor is a general purpose NPN. Match the rating with the expected current flow into the trailer brake controller. Part number 276-1617 will handle .05A, and would probably work just fine for this application. If you aren't sure of the current draw on this line, then go with part number 276-2041 will handle about 8A. Overkill, I know, but 276-2041 is actually a few cents cheaper. 276-1617 comes in a pack of 15, though...

Water and antifreeze are compressable. If you take a given volume of coolant, and change the pressure applied to it, then the volume will change. Granted the change in volume will be slight, but it is measurable. Coolant will expand when heated, and contract when cooled. A given mass of coolant will have a certain volume at a low temperature, and a much higher volume at higher temperature - given that the ambient pressure is the same. The effect is easily visible without measuring equipment. The materials used in engine construction expand and contract with temperature changes. This results in reduced volume in the coolant passages - picture a box full of partially inflated balloons. A certain volume of free space will be present between the balloons. Now blow the balloons up a little more, and the available volume between the balloons will shrink. The effect is slight, but measurable. So, the phenomenon that is most visible is coolant expansion due to temperature changes. What is in the cooling system? Coolant and air, right? In a given, relatively fixed volume (aside from slight block expansion). Heat the coolant. The coolant will want to expand. The available volume is the same, so the pressure will increase. The air component will be exposed to increasing pressure from the coolant. Air, compared to coolant, is very, very compressable. This means you can drastically change the volume of a given mass of air without affecting the pressure very much. Since the air will compress easily, it will give in to the pressure exerted by the coolant. This will allow the coolant to expand, and rise in the degas jug. As long as the pressure in the system does not exceed 16psi (or whatever the cap is rated for) then the system will remain sealed and will drop to the original level and pressure when the temperature falls to the starting point. Another way to think of it: There is coolant and air in the system. When it heats up, the air in the top of the jug is pressurized. Where did the pressure come from? From coolant pressing on it from the bottom of the air cushion. Revving the engine makes the coolant level drop... The degas jug is typically tapped into the system on the suction side of the water pump (in the lower radiator hose or near it's connection to the front cover). This is for safety, because this is the lowest pressure area of the system. Rev the engine, the water pump sucks harder, and drops the pressure of the coolant in that area. Downstream of the water pump the pressure increases and expands the upper radiator hose, heater hose, and whatnot. This increases the volume of these areas, coolant fills the extra space, and coolant is drawn from the degas jug, dropping it's level. Crossflow radiators had the cap on the cold side of the radiator. Vertical flow radiators had the cap in the hot side.

Evidently no spell checker though...

Awesome. Now that is a professional image!

You're right - the right side of the picture is the step up portion, and that's the part that usually fails. It will unbolt from the case, and as you see it unplugs from the main board. Risk of shock is pretty low; 48V is less than the voltage on a telephone line. On a hot day, with really sweaty hands, the risk of shock is a little higher, but still not likely. I would imagine that a jig specially made to handle the unit will be a special service tool, or a discharge tool that connects to the failed board or the capacitors directly. And I am quite surprised that we aren't rebuilding these units yet...

I tap the switch against the radius arm instead of trying to bump it with my thumb... Much shorter bump that way...

I just recently picked one up on sale at Best Buy. I got a Cannon Powershot A590... Lots of nice features, a pretty good streamline mode, nice video capability, and accomodates a 2GB card - enough for our last vacation in the Smoky Mountains. In this picture, my little one is backlit by a relatively low sun, and i did not use a fill flash to illuminate her - I was standing on some light colored gravel, and that reflected enough light into the picture. This was from some distance away and zoomed in 4X optically. The image quality was degraded from resizing down to 600x800. Original size is 2448x3264 and about 2MB. Never mind the chocolate on her shirt... I would recommend playing with several at the store, then go home and read reviews of the ones you liked on amazon.com to see what other people think.

Anyone else having to replace right side up pipes on these things? I've had three so far that were leaking at the flex joint, and a couple that needed replacement after messing up the threads in the EGRTA sensor bung... Fun little job.... I finally broke down and bought a remote starter switch. The lack of access to the crank pulley, along with 8 torque convertor nuts made the remote starter switch much more cost effective...

Yeah, I'm making time on just about everything heavy-line. The last head gasket job on an e-series paid 21.1 for the repair time (plus whatever for the diag time) and I killed it by about 5 hours... But I've been a heavy line bitch forever....

Umm, I think that "talented monkeys" is about the best we can hope for until the end of the forseeable future. OASIS quickstart. The unidentified network communication the IDS performs when connecting to a vehicle. PC/ED's interactive measurements with the VMM and IDS. I imagine that IDS support at Ford and ACES will start communicating with each other soon, if they haven't already... I can see a job interview for a service tech in 10 years... "Do you have your own tools and can you read?" "I can't read, sir" "That's ok, son, we've got JAWS installed on your IDS terminal."

Noted, Brad. Thanks for the reminder. Well, I wouldn't kick her outa bed for eating crackers, but I wouldn't put her on the top shelf, either. She is thin - rail thin. I mean anorexic, Ethiopian thin. In fact, she's earned the nickname "Buckethead Wendy" from a cartoon that comes on at night on the Cartoon Network. Here's a picture:

If you decide to check your process list to see just what it is that your computer is doing in it's spare time, reference this website: www.answersthatwork.com and go to their task list at the bottom of the screen. It's a little outdated, but pretty accurate. They also sell a program called The Ultimate Troubleshooter. I've tried it, but wouldn't recommend it to most people. It's fun to play around with, though.

Well, this bus came back in last week, with the driver stating that the truck loses power at times. Checked it out, coolant smells like butt and there is a huge ECT/EOT deviation - like 50 degrees or more in the stall. They have a rocker box leaking on the driver's side, too.. So, out with the motor and onto our specially designed 6.0/6.4 engine stand (a pallet with four 2x4's in a rectangle. I wish I were joking). Off with it's heads, and the problem becomes clear. The left side head gasket no longer has any blue around the cylinders, and there is significant carbon accumulation in the coolant passages in the driver's side head. The passenger side looks good. So, I guess that was the problem all along - blown head gasket that eventually caused the oil cooler to pack up with shit and make the engine go into derate. The fleet manager and all his little flunkies came to the shop to flock around their bus all stripped down. - "Gooh Lee! How you gonna put dat back together?!" "Have no fear, gentle consumer, I am a professional!" The service manager joked with me about how bad it would be if I packed my tools and left with this bus still scattered. And then a while later, she joked with me about it again... Heh, I think she may really be worried! I might can finagle a raise outa this! Or at least get her to kiss my ass a little.... Anyway, just thought I would update..

Well, with no moving parts, and adequate ventilation, a computer should not ever wear out. Sure, the hard drive will start to get glitchy, and the optical drives will eventually fail, but the guts of the computer should not ever wear out. I've got an old TRS-80 and a Timex Sinclair upstairs in the closet. Connect them up to the TV (yeah, no monitor in those days...) and they still operate. What prompts most consumers to replace their computers is two things - failure and loss of performance. Failure will happen, but for the most part is preventable. Pop open the case of your computer, Keith, and see how much dust has accumulated in the last ten years. That dust acts like an insulator, and prevents heat from dissipating to the air in the case. Do you have a filter on the power supply fan? If so, is it stopped up? A hot computer will degrade the solid state circuitry over time and cause a failure. Removing the dust and replacing the filters will make the computer run cooler. Dust will also conduct a small amount of current, so when the accumulation gets thick enough, some of the traces that are closer together will short circuit - and that usually causes an instantaneous failure. How about the quality of the power supply? Is it conditioned before entering the computer? Are the phone/network lines filtered too? Surge suppression will prevent small, cumulative damage to the circuitry as well as stop some catastrophic failures. Where is the computer located? Is it in a heavy desk on the ground floor of a slab building? Or on a flimsy table in a conventional residence during line dancing practice? Vibration will shorten the life of moving components and will help locate the weakest joints in the circuitry... How about performance? Has the computer slowed down in the last year? Most computers do not technically slow dow over time - they run just as fast as they did when they were new. Unfortunately, just like cell phone plans and DirecTV contracts, it is easy to add stuff, but impossible to take things away. How many icons are there just to the left of the clock on your windows taskbar? Is there a little "<" symbol there hiding a few more? How many of those programs do you use? Do you recognize all of them? Now do the three finger salute (control-alt-delete) and look at the process list. Do you have more than 30 processes running? Do any of them have "sched" in the name (like "realsched.exe")? Those programs are watching the clock, and pinging a site on the internet (realsched.exe pings realnetworks.com) looking for updates. Do you have an ipod? If so, why are there three programs constantly running on your computer, just waiting for you to plug your ipod back in? I'm going to put my foot up Steve Jobs' ass the next time I see him... What I recommend, and practice with my own computers, is to start with a clean boot. Go and purchase a copy of the operating system you want to use. Then format your computer to this operating system.. That way there is no "AOL" junk or special offers or any other crap from the computer manufacturer. Something else I do p8iuois regularly audit the programs I use and classify them as often, occasionaly, rarely and never used. The never used get deleted and all processes associated with them are suspended and removed. Often used get a spot in the start menu, and I allow resident processes from them to run constantly. Occasional programs only get a desktop icon, and no standby processes are allowed to run. Rarely used programs are relegated to a listing in the "all programs" section of the start menu. This keeps a clean desktop, a speedy and relevant start menu, and low idle processing overhead. There are only three icons beside my clock on the task bar - antivirus software, wireless connection status, and the wireless configuration status (since I use my laptop on more then one network). Moving components are another story. They will fail much sooner than the solid state components. But they can last longer if you take a few precautions.. For hard drives, make sure you've got plenty of RAM. Windows will allocate a section of the hard drive for "virtual memory" if you do not have enough RAM to do your work.. Take a look at the bottom of the window after a three finger salute. you will see "commit charge" and "total memory." Compare total memory to the physical memory you have installed in your computer. The difference is the virtual memory allocation. Ideally this should be zero. If not, add enough RAM to your computer, then turn off the virtual memory allocation system. This will speed up your computer - RAM is faster than hard drive access - and save wear and tear on your hard drive - "thrashing" is harmful in the long run. In recent years, applications have become bloated. Take Microsoft Word, for instance... The newest version needs, what, 1GB of memory and about an acre of hard drive space? For what, at the most a few kilobytes of text? Oh, wait, we have to have three miles of header information appended to every user generated file, and there has to be every Word option loaded and ready to jump into operation at the click of a button. I say bullshit. The 2003 version of Word does the exact same job and uses less than half of the resources. You can't tell which version of word processing software generated a document once it is printed out on paper. You don't need all those extra toolbars in Internet Explorer either - I have a coworker that had the Google toolbar, the Yahoo toolbar, and a PirateBay toolbar running on her IE window. Add that to all the optional toolbars from IE, with the oversized radio buttons, and the useable area of the window shrank to about 1/2 of the height of the monitor! Anyway, enough ranting. It boils down to this - know what your computer is doing. Trim out the excess crap. Don't give in to bloatware - install the latest and greatest software only if there is a concrete reason to do so. Have enough RAM for your applications. And keep your computer physically clean and stable. It will last a lot longer than you think it will... Whoa, sorry about the length of the post....

I had one last week with a blown EGR cooler - coolant smelled burned. I didn't get the EOT/ECT deviation, because water would leak out faster than I could put it in. I am, however, working an E-450 bus. Last year, the fleet manager comlained that he was constantly having ot add water to this unit. I never could duplicate, even after driving it the same distance they do in one day. Finally, I put an EGR cooler on to shut him up. Fast forward to this week, it comes back in with another 20,000 miles. Fleet manager says that the engine starts losing power after driving it for awhile. Turns out that the oil cooler is stopped up, and the EOT will shoot way up. The PCM goes into derate, and limits the power. The coolant smells like feet. Unwashed feet. Unwashed feet wrapped in leathery, burnt bacon with honey mustard that has gone bad. Actually, it smells and looks like Bars Leak. But I cant prove that, and the fleet manager denies adding anything to the coolant except Ford Gold and distilled water. So, it is getting an EGR cooler and an oil cooler, and a thorough rinse. The other complaint on the truck - an oil leak. Coming from the left side rocker box. I've got one full bay stacked with parts taken off the truck so far, and I can finally see the motor!!

So I get this '08 towed in today, no crank. Verify concern, all the lights light up on the dash. P1000 in memory, KOEO passes. PID data shows STARTER_AW is "off" with the key on and in start position. EGT sensors show ambient temperature except EGRTA, which is 4.65V and 140 degrees F. The concern is present in park and neutral, but I did not verify TR data. The backup alarm sounded in reverse. The rest of the story: Vehicle died while driving on the job site yesterday. Would not crank when attempting to restart. Using the business's generic scan tool, they retrieve and clear codes - they did not record the codes, of course. The vehicle still would not crank, so it was loaded onto a trailer, sat overnight, and then brought to us this morning. Back to me in the parking lot. After the above tests, I turned the key on, went under the hood and jumped the starter solenoid wire to the battery hot terminal to crank the engine. Engine cranked and started normally. Drove the vehicle into the shop, still no codes present on continuous, KOEO, or KOER. Engine now starts properly with the ignition switch... Test drive vehicle to clear P1000, no drivabiilty concerns present... Recent repair history - replaced EGRTA for a P040D. Verified an erratic temerature reading before repair, and verified proper operation of the sensor after repair. Ultimately, I had to release the vehicle back to the owners with the understanding that they refrain from using their scan tool on it in the future.... Any idea what may have happened?

For a long, long time, news of celebrity deaths really didn't make that much of an impact on me. Mostly because I was behind that generation... But, especially in this decade, that really seems to be changing. It seems that the deaths are hittimg closer and closer to home. With MJ, I was old enough to jam with MTV when it first came on the air. I remember seeing Ed and Farrah on television. Phil Hartman from, among many other things, the Simpsons. David Carridine from Kung Fu. Dom Deluise. Paul "The rest of the story" Harvey. Cheap Trick. Nirvana. I even recognize names in the local newspaper obituary column. Feels almost like I'm in the line of little metal ducks at the county fair, and patrons are taking pot shots at us... I think that it's tough because my family has shrunk so much in the last decade... I donno.. Guess it's inevitable that the longer I live, the more people I'll see die...

So I get this ticket for a 2009 Escape, 773 miles on the odometer, and the power steering provides no assist. IDS test shows no communication with the EPAS. Look it up in the servie manual - the module is an integral part of the steering column, and contains a 12V, 65A motor used to assist the driver, and a manual rack and pinion. Crawl under the dash - module is there, all the connectors look like they are plugged in. One connector supplies hot at all times power and key on power. Two cavities in this big ole honkin' connector, with some nice large wires going to it. Cycling the power supply to inoperative modules has been surprisingly effective at getting them to talk on the network on these later model vehicles these days, so I reach up to disconnect the power connector. *Snap* Oh, that sucks... The connector housing has broken off of the module, and is still attatched to the harness. No wonder the module is not responding... A close look at the setup is dissapointing. The connector housing is not secured to the module housing in any way. There are no fasteners retaining the connector housing to the circuit board. Only four surprisingly small solder tabs retain this housing. These solder tabs which, by the way, are required to carry 65 amps or more! Now, I'm no electrical engineer, but I think I'd have designed the tabs to be a bit larger to accomodate the current. And also some sort of fastener to retain the housing to the circuit board. Or at least some sort of molding in the module case to keep the housing from moving around... Oh, and I think I mentioned that this module is under the dash, mounted to the underside of the steering column. The power connector is directly over the clutch pedal. Sure enough, when putting my foot on the clutch, my toe is less than an inch from the connector... Part is not stocked anywhere in the country. Referred to vendor.. Awesome...

When you transfer your sensors and the block heater, don't forget the little nipple on the lower right side of the engine... I went to set my stripped short block down, forgot the nipple, and squashed it...

Make sure yo've got the right tools to torque the head bolts... I used a 4:1 multiplier, a 3/4" drive 5/8" socket, and a small dab of antiseize under the bolt heads... See the "Head Bolt Torque" thread...