2.3 EcoBoost: The Details You Should Know

everyone welcome back to bronco wild outdoors today's video is on the 2.3 liter four cylinder that's found in the new 2021 ford bronco and the soon to be 2022 ford bronco so let's talk about the history of the 2.3 just so you're clear on what engine is actually in the bronco in 1974 ford introduced the lima 2.3 this was a single overhead cam cast block cast cylinder head engine it didn't make a whole lot of horsepower and it ran from 1974 until 1997. it powered multiple vehicles ranger capri mustang maybe even a minivan or two it was a great engine and over that time period it saw increased horsepower increased fuel economy at one point two spark plugs per cylinder and in the mid 80s ford boosted it to put it in the svo mustang but that engine has nothing to do with the 2.3 liter that is found in the new bronco in certain conversations i'll see and read in here where it's been a great engine for 30 or 40 years well it has been a great engine it's just not this engine so here's the back story in 2000 ford cans came up with a program called the duratec program multiple engines in that duratec family and the 2.0 was derived from or came from the mazda l so the mazda volvo and ford engineers put their heads together and came up with the duratec program and the duratec 2.0 ran up until well it's still running today it's just been modified quite a bit but in 2010 the ecoboost 2.0 was created that engine was the launch pad for this 2.3 in 2015 ford introduced the 2.3 ecoboost uh this engine is really really cool it only shares two things with the 2.0 the deck height which is measured from the center of the crank to the top of the block where the cylinder head bolts that dimension is the same and also the cylinder bore or the diameter of the cylinder is the exact same and that is it the 2.3 is a completely separate block it has larger oiling passages and water passages the internals are different as well but before we get to the internals reinforced ladder reinforced uh ribs around the cylinder wall a lot stronger engine but the internals i'm excited to get there because it's pretty cool ford uh ford used forage to 4340 steel for the crank and the connecting rods uh now this is a very durable heat treated steel it's uh it's it's real it's used in race engines we use in performance stuff all across the board it's pretty impressive that ford went to that extent to put it into the bronco and by the way we're standing in front of my 2.7 badlands here i don't have a 2.3 here to show you so we're just talking about it with this in the background hope you don't mind um and by the way i do love my 2.7 bronco this thing is awesome but the 2.3 is a great engine and i want to tell you a few unique features about it if you have a 2 3 or considering it or you have one on order you should be very comfortable in what you're getting so first of all the forged crank and rods like we just talked about the oil pan is aluminum and the entire engine is cast aluminum by the way including the cylinder head so unlike the 27 where you have cgi as part of the block and a luminous part of the block this is all cast aluminum oil pan block cylinder block and cylinder head but it's a deep sump oil pan there is baffles inside that helps you when you're off-roading you're bouncing around keeps the oil from sloshing and the oil pump cavitating and actually running out of oil you also have a pretty steep degree on this bronco i think that if you're going down say down a hill pointing down that 45 degrees maybe even up as well and i know left and right about 30 degrees so this bronco can lean pretty stoutly and also still pump oil and not worry about cavitating but the baffles and the oil pump are great uh we do have a dual overhead cam engine here and each cam is its variable timing so you have cam phasers on this engine as well and a time and chain that really helps a pretty thick durable metal timing chain before we get too far on top of the engine there is a high volume high velocity chain driven oil pump in this engine different than the belt driven variable capacity pump in the 2.7 now when we get to the pistons this is really really cool how they integrated some cool stuff with the pistons as well as the oiling system in the block okay so the pistons are alloy aluminum with steel ring lands the top of the piston is reinforced for the heat that the turbo is going to give this engine and so the ring lens are hardened and very capable of handling the pressure now there's uh different oiling holes in the friction ring or oil ring on the side of the piston the the lower ring on the side of the piston is a friction ring and oil ring and there's oiling holes there so the oiling holes have been formed so that there's there's less drag on the side of the piston you know we talked about that before aaron people in aerospace love that but it's really resistance um and uh or friction and used in engines i guess we want to talk friction and not drag like i said last week but it it adds enough lubrication on the cylinder walls but also this engine has special oil oilers that are in the block that sprays oil underneath the piston now this is critical because the cylinder by the way the bigger the diameter of the piston the more heat it absorbs and on a boosted engine there's a lot of heat there ford kept the piston small in diameter and they did some cool stuff with the design on the top of the piston to try to dissipate the heat now the oilers that are in the block they spray oil underneath the piston and this absorbs heat from the top of the piston down to kind of help keep that piston cool that's different than any other engine out there because it enables uh and there may be an engine on the planet with it it's just not a typical oiling system for underneath the cylinder block so it's actually pretty cool uh that they are they're looking at dropping the temperature of the head of the piston by spraying oil underneath it so and it doesn't hurt resistance in the engine or friction so to speak now in the cylinder head this really gets cool this is an integrated exhaust manifold just like the 2.7 there are passages let's just call them chambers that lead to a dual scroll single turbo on this engine now if you remember the 2.7 has twin turbo so two monoscroll turbos this has one dual scroll turbo now this is where it gets really technical so there's something in an engine called pulse every time a cylinder fires exhaust valve opens there's a sudden rush of pressure in the manifold and what happens is when all your cylinders are dumping into one common manifold the turbo doesn't get an even flow of pressure and temperature it's getting these pulses these and that hurts the turbo keeping it spinning uh as tight as it should or as fast as it should and there's also some lagging getting it going so what four did uh this is four cylinder so if we picture the front cylinder is one the one behind that's two three and four uh the way this engine fires ford decided to add cylinders one and four in one chamber and two and three and another chamber so the firing oil in this engine is one three four and two so basically what happens is cylinder one fires dump into the exhaust the next cylinder of fire is three that dumps into that chamber which remember is separate then cylinder four fires off again and that puts it back in the first chamber and then cylinder two fires and puts in the other chamber basically you don't have these opposing forces of exhaust dumping into the chamber feeding the turbo or the exhaust manifold in this case it's an integrated integrated exhaust manifold as well so that's been really cool to keep this small diameter dual scroll turbo spinning fast now this helps with low end torque it actually helps with torque all across the power band but it really gives you the least amount of turbo lag that you can expect along with the turbo being mounted close to the engine that helps with a limiting turbo lag as well and so these two things right there are are huge now i've seen in some of the forums people say well the turbos are so small well there's a reason for it the turbo moves exactly what it needs to move in this engine but the smaller the diameter of the turbo itself the turbine is it spins up faster so you have instant more instant horsepower and it carries all the way through that torque band and uh or that power band that you have so the torque on this engine is is uh pretty gradual but constant so you don't have this sudden peak if you look at it on a on a a dyno you wouldn't see this blurp and and then you know kind of falls off this thing carries it pretty well so as you're coming up to speed on the interstate you're doing a little baja stuff this engine is pretty tight i like it for the low end torque now getting back to the torque if you look at a 2o and a 2 3 you could say that a 2 3 is a 2.0 stroker motor because the rods in this or in the 2.3 are shorter than they are in a 2.0 but the throw of the crank is longer you know there's a way to figure uh the stroke of an engine and basically is when the rod journal is the furthest from the cylinder head you do the center line measurement and the rod in the journal is closest to a cylinder head you do a center line there and the difference in that travel is the stroke and ford's did some pretty cool stuff with the piston design as as well as the crank so this has a longer stroke which is better for torque and especially lower end torque so the 2.3 is uh it's pretty substantial you know the horsepower on regular gas is 275 horsepower and 315 feet pounds of torque where and if you use premium gas you're at 300 horsepower and 325 feet pounds of torque so it's pretty pretty strong engine so we've covered the turbo and sort of the cool things about the turbo which we do have a video coming up on turbo etiquette and those are two words you don't typically hear in one sentence but it's the truth there's a way that you can take care of the turbo on your bronco to make it last a lot longer and if you're new to the turbo world you probably want to check this out because there's some helpful hints in there if you've had turbos for years you get it you already know this i'm sure but hey watch it who knows might be good for entertainment for you but you know my goal is to help educate people on these engines and kind of the inner workings of them so the 2.3 is a very reliable reliable engine it's used across multiple platforms which serves as an issue the one issue being if you try to google what's the compression ratio on a 2.3 ecoboost now you might see nine point four to one you might see nine point five to one uh you also see ten to one um and in the broncos case the uh the uh compression ratio is ten to one uh you know the focus rs which creates i think about 350 horsepower it's 9.4 to 1. uh the mustang is a little bit different and it's um it's somewhat i think it's 9.5 to 1 and the horsepower on that one is is different i can't remember exactly maybe mid 30s or 330s 3 20 3 30 something like that so you can see that the architecture of the 2.3 spans multiple models and also multiple horsepower so the basic architecture that you have in the two three is capable of a lot of a lot of upsizing for there so um anyway you know ford's built this engine with the torque and the horsepower to meet and fit the needs of the bronco and so keep that in mind it's not just the most horsepower or the most torque horsepower and torque by the way you ever want a good read and get confused read up the correlation between horsepower and torque basically torque is what i'm concerned about because that's the ability to turn a shaft a crank uh an axle a drive shaft a wheel and that's the ability horsepower you know bad example gets you there in a hurry so but this engine is really uh really awesome i think uh if you get it you're gonna like it you know the variable cam timing is something that is very beneficial uh it is direct injection uh so we don't have the luxury of dual injection on this engine where you have one injector is spring gas into the intake to help wash the intake valve off so you definitely want to make sure that you're using a high quality oil either recommended by ford or you can look at some full synthetics this engine does have a synthetic blend of oil just like the 2.7 if you watch my 2.7 video i did mistakenly say full synthetic because everything i own is full synthetic and i just made that mistake but it is a synthetic blend hey incidentally if you look at your owner's manual under the specifications section you go to maintenance and then under specifications there's a blip about an alternative oil for you to use as far as a weight if you're in very cold climates you have for cold starting you have the option of using 0 30 versus 5 5 30. so keep that in mind it's something to check out and uh hey hope you like this video just a little bit on the 2.3 uh might not be as in-depth as the other engine but basically it's a solid engine um aluminum cast aluminum block cylinder head even an oil pan uh now this engine uses a spin on filter uh versus the cartridge filter that is in the the canister that is in the two seven so it's more of a traditional metal oil plug versus plastic as well as a traditional oil filter trying to think some other stuff on there that hey and by the way if you haven't already like and subscribe to our channel hit me up in the comments uh other questions that you have about this engine the 2.3 any question you have at all you know like i said i don't want to give too much of the technical uh you know get into you know the the turbos and everything else any more than what we did because it gets kind of like it's like spaghetti right it really is but those are the basics the 2.3 is a good solid engine great architecture it's been around since 2015 and they're constantly changing things like the injector pocket and the piston is different than say some of the other 2.3s out there so the small changes that's happened has been unique and i think unique to bronco you have a little bit difference in the mustang or the focus rs and so anyway hope you liked the video and please like and subscribe uh subscribe to our channel hit the like on this video if you don't mind that helps youtube send this out to other people that like bronco content and and we're trying to spread the word so i hope this was helpful if you have any questions please let me know see ya

Channel: Driven Wild Outdoors

Views: 83,328

Keywords: 2.3ecoboost, 2.3ecoboost engine, ecoboost, ford mustang, ford, ford performance, ecoboost mustang, 2.3ecoboostbronco, bronco, 2.3 ecoboost, 2.3 bronco, badlands bronco, bronco badlands, bronco badlands sasquatch, bronco badlands 2021, outer banks bronco, base bronco, ford bronco wildtrak, first edition bronco, ford performance parts, 2021 bronco, ford bronco, new ford bronco, 2.3 f150 ecoboost, 2021 ford bronco badlands, 2021 ford bronco review, ford bronco badlands

Id: urBxAhhvlOQ

Length: 15min 55sec (955 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 31 2021