3 Other Shops, Didn't Fix this Car. They Made it WORSE

all right today in the shop i have a 2010 cc 3.6 liter vr6 automatic with a number of various concerns including check engine light car runs rough car has a hard time starting now this car apparently has been to a bunch of other shops had who knows how many parts thrown at it it's a pretty good descriptor of how things are gonna go when there's an ecm sitting in the passenger seat of the car so i have it now we're gonna walk through all the issues on this car and hopefully figure out what the heck is wrong with it now if you're looking at this ecm i don't think that they actually replaced the ecm i think they got it in case they needed it because this one says goods but needs programming on the back and it's got our junkyard numbers on it so uh we'll set this aside and hope that we don't need it first things first we're gonna run a complete scan on the car and check every single module in the car while that's going on i'm gonna do a visual inspection and see if i can see anything obviously crazy with the car that'll point us in the right direction and also look to see if i can tell what parts may have been replaced on the car all right so we have our full scan done and as you can see there's a whole bunch of faults stored in our car i'm not going to focus on too much anything other than the ecm just at this point we can address any of this stuff down the road let's look at our engine first though circuit for a break vacuum pump open circuit paying attention to the freeze frame data here looks like cold start that's happening we have an intake manifold tuning valve control circuit bank one electrical malfunction we have a fuel pressure regulator mechanical function fuel pressure sensor manual malfunction misfire misfire and misfire now none of these codes are jumping out at me as like this is a super normal 3.6 liter issue the 3.6 liters do have an issue with timing chain wear causing low fuel pressure so that'll be something we look at once we get the car running now for the p119a malfunction here there is a tech tip for that for checking for vacuum leaks at the intake manifold that could definitely cause our misfires that might point to a fuel pressure related issue for sure and you know what it's not going to cause a circuit issue on either one of the other two faults but if everybody's unhappy it could surely make for a problem what we also want to look at is are all these codes stored at the same time yes yes yes basically pretty much well this one's a little bit later you know definitely a lower voltage misfire yes okay so all these are stored pretty close together which may or may not mean that they have some kind of influence over each other next we'll go ahead and start the car up we'll monitor our misfires on our scan tool and we'll see what we can see hopefully we'll see some kind of misfire we'll also go ahead and look at fuel trims while we while we're in here all right so it looks like we have a dead misfire on cylinder two but that's the only cylinder that we're seeming to have a problem with see what our fuel trim is our fuel trim is pulling a little bit of fuel back but that's well within our specification that'll be a more important reading when we get the car warmed up this measuring value block here we're looking at is timing this is a place we can look at how much the chain is actually worn or the tensioner's worn or something in the timing circuit is unhappy sometimes with those fuel pressure issues the chain can be worn enough to cause a fuel pressure issue but not worn enough to cause a timing issue typically plus or minus five in this measured value block 93 field tree is kind of what i'm looking for but the car is also cold so we need to really see what it is when the car is warm now it looks like our misfire kind of went away so we'll probably end up checking our spark plugs because we have a complete unknown maintenance history on this car for all we know it could be the wrong spark plugs in the car now i'm noticing my lambda control and valued value block one field four is way pulling fuel away for bank two this is something that we may wanna look at as well especially when you compare bank one to bank two what we really need to do though is we really need to get the car up to temperature before we're hyper focused on a lot of this stuff we got the car up to temperature even though all those codes were stored at a cold start temperature i wanted to warm the car up and see what it does i have very poor information on this car when i got it so i wanted to see what would happen when the car warmed up i also wanted to run the timing diagnosis where it runs a sweep of the intake cam goes all the way to full advance all the way back and then back to its normal position and that passed so we're good there but as i'm sitting there running these tests i'm thinking i don't remember this engine with this intake manifold having an intake controller flap of any kind let's not say it doesn't have it but i don't remember that i also don't recall this having a brake booster vacuum pump either it may but i don't recall and this is where like trusting your gut on things at least initially makes sense so what i did was keep in mind we have an ecm in the car in the passenger seat i pulled up the cowl which was completely broken it's in fact i guess we can we can go ahead and get it out of the car uh and i found a junkyard ecm that it looks like it's been opened up and resealed so what i need to do next is check and see if this is even the correct ecm for this car see there's a tsb for one of those faults that we have that doesn't apply to our engine it's for a bpy but it says that if you replace an ecm you have to replace the corresponding fuel pressure sensor because the two are kind of tied together and maybe one of them's been updated at some point so if we don't have the right ecm all the data that the engine is sending to the ecm might be correct but it's interpreted wrong so the ecm is freaking out like oh my gosh i got something wrong even though it might not actually have something wrong or even more insidious it has something wrong it's sending the report and the interpretation of the report is not correct all right one of the beauties of somebody being in here before is that usually makes things much easier to uh to get out so here's our ecm now clearly it's a junkyard ecm it's got the sticker from the junkyard right there it's actually got a date 12 30 of 20 so boy this car's probably been broken for quite some time our next step we need to see if this is the right part number for the ecm remember i said that this one i don't think has an intake runner and i don't know about the brake pressure sensor or the the whatever the brake one was maybe this is some ecm from another car so i'm gonna give my man paulie d a call and uh let's see what he's got to say maybe he can look up some pr codes and stuff for us also there's a razor blade that is rusty behind the cowl which means somebody was probably cutting wiring harnesses ugh oh yeah they were cool story bro okay i'm waiting for paul to call me back and while i'm waiting i'm actually gonna plug in this other ecm that says good but need programming so it's probably not coded to the vehicle immobilizer system which is a system that will prevent the car from starting if one of the right components is not installed so i'm going to plug this in and just see what kind of codes we get maybe we have the wrong ecm and it's looking for things the car doesn't have and maybe this one is a little bit closer sometimes with these vr6s it's really tough to make sure that you have the right software and the right ecm hardware part number so let's plug it in and see what happens okay basically as soon as i turn the key on you can hear the fans running on high speed which means the ecm is absolutely not happy whatsoever that's one of the kind of the dead giveaways that the ecm isn't happy fans running on high speed i'm going to still check the faults anyway just to see what it's got i'm guessing we're gonna have a whole bunch of really upset modules and we'll just end up pulling it back out and seeing if maybe we do actually have the right ecm okay talk about super unhappy with this other ecm uh i couldn't even get the scan tool to talk to the ecm which actually is kind of weird even with the wrong ecm it should still try and communicate and it wasn't communicating at all in fact i got the red could not be reached warnings maybe a sign that we have multiple problems or maybe that despite saying it's a good ecm ain't not no one good ecm so this is the part where i really really i hate this because what else are we going to do right i don't want to spend a bunch of time diagnosing the car all to find out we have the wrong ecm in the car but how do you test this to make sure that it is the right one other than looking up part numbers and hopefully you can cross-reference the numbers and see if you actually do have the right part number say part number again charles hey how are you i'm doing hi buddy what's wrong with you so i have a 10 cc that has a myriad of customer complaints i am concerned that i actually might not have the right ecm in the car okay um let's do this why don't you shoot me the vin number of the car that you're working on and i can pull that up all right uh let me get that in this is always gonna be a good a good thing when one the ecm that that is in the car looks like it was under water it actually looks like somebody dug it out of the mud and then there was another one in the passenger seat well usually the best thing to do is if one ecn doesn't fix it you just put another one in it and you just keep going this feels a lot like a lot like a cam sensor or an oil pressure sensor so the ecm that should be in this one is 03 h 906 o 32 f as in frank p as in peter okay i have a c as in charlie um installed in the car based on that number that is for a b6 passat there's the older gen 36 there's this gen 36 there's front wheel drive there's all-wheel drive there's automatic there's dsg i don't know was there ever a manual front-wheel drive maybe it looks like the b6 cars do have the actuator for the variable runner on the b6 facade but on a cc i don't show any variable intake stuff so i believe what we have is the wrong ecm for the car awesome now i like i said i had another ecm sitting in the seat maybe you can see if this maybe the one that belongs in the car the uh what is it fp maybe it supersedes to this one same part number but it ends in fq fun fun questions fun questions based on what i'm looking at here that is for an all-wheel drive car so they have van splits with that one actually has the same vin split coverage but that one's for all-wheel drive now i would say that one's probably more likely to work because it actually is for the same engines for the blv um that would be in a cc as opposed to uh the the older passat one which was also a blv but different so i i plugged it in and the car got super unhappy um like it wouldn't even talk to the ecm it was so unhappy fans on high speed so i mean the other the other thing i'm concerned about is like this says good but need programming this might not be any good of an ecm i mean those fans kicking on high speed is a common smoked ecm yes that is what happens when you break an ecm uh on on mark 5 and b6 don't jump start your car backwards because you'll smoke the ecm ask several salesmen that i worked with how they know i i mean at this point i don't know that i'm i'm going to really be able to go any further with the diagnosis on this car until i get the right software in an ecm well there you go there you have it so we have confirmed that we don't have the right ecm in the car we've also confirmed that the one sitting in the passenger seat she no good either so really in a perfect world at this point we would stop we would get the proper ecm or at least the proper software in the car and see what happened next however that's a send the ecm out type deal and i want to know a little bit more about the car before we pull the trigger on an ecm all to find out that maybe we have a timing chain issue a high pressure fuel pump issue or something else going on that we're actually seeing now late last night because i couldn't sleep i went ahead and pulled spark plugs pulled ignition coils pulled the upper intake manifold and pulled the valve cover probably not the most efficient next step but i had a lot of questions what i found was cylinder 2 actually did have a lot of moisture buildup inside the cylinder when i pulled the intake manifold i bore scoped down each individual cylinder and found that there's a pretty good amount of carbon buildup all across our engine so the carbon buildup may very well likely be what's causing that misfire on cold start remember the misfire went away when the car warmed up that's a pretty common sign of carbon buildup because i was super close i went ahead and popped the valve cover off just to take a look i set the engine to our base timing and all of our timing marks lined up 16 rollers between the timing marks on our camshaft so base timing was good however there was a pretty good amount of slack at the top of the chain between the two camshafts i also put the bore scope down and tried to see a little bit better on the high pressure fuel pump lobe this high pressure fuel pump is driven by the timing chain on the back side of the engine and while i don't think we really have a severe timing issue a slight timing issue coupled with a slight amount of wear on the lobe that drives the high pressure fuel pump could absolutely cause all of our fuel issues i also went ahead and lifted the back seat up clearly somebody had been in there made sure all of our connections were good at the low pressure fuel pump next we're going to get the car outside get it up to temp and i'm going to check our fuel pressure readings one of the great things about this engine is we can look at certain fuel pressure readings and see if we can at least get closer to confirming we do have a high pressure fuel pump failure or we have chains that aren't out of specification but are a little bit unhappy so when i just started up the car after being completely cold it actually started up and rain a bit better than it did the last cold start i also went ahead and did the output test of the solenoid on a high pressure fuel pump to make sure it clicked it did which means we have power and ground and the solenoid electrically is working anyway also notice that it looks like somebody pierced the wire with a probe or something like that and i had cut that wire at the ecm i'm assuming to test the wire from the ecm to the solenoid on top of the high pressure fuel pump so i drove it tried to drive it as spirited as i possibly could and for a few times it actually ran okay the longer i drove it the worse it started to run so i went in and checked the adaptation of our timing as well as fuel trim it was really weird because initially off vital fuel trim was pulling fuel away then i drove it again and it actually started to add fuel back in so our fuel trim numbers went from negative meaning pulling fuel away to positive meaning adding fuel i also readdressed our timing correction in measured value block 93 3 and now we're at negative 4.0 instead of 3.0 i feel like if we kept driving it that number would probably hit five so here's what i think is happening i think our timing is out just a little bit not a ton and definitely not enough to cause a timing fault i also think the lobe that drives the high pressure fuel pump is probably also worn a little bit this car has 200 000 miles on it or give or take so it being worn is not really out of the question so not only do we have an ecm issue those faults for the brake booster pump and the intake manifold came back right away we really do have some fueling issues now is it just a high pressure pump is it just timing these are things that i don't know if we got to do timing chains we'll probably end up doing a high pressure fuel pump anyway but either way this car needs some serious work and what drives me bonkers about this kind of thing is we don't have a definitive answer unfortunately there isn't the boop it's this part go ahead and replace it it's a culmination of all kinds of different stuff and the car's been to a lot of shops so there's some hackery potential as well and some shotgunning of unknown parts obviously the wrong ecm when they plugged it in it probably tripped this intake manifold fault that the car doesn't even have freak out send it away send it away send it away or the customer did some shop bouncing i don't really know the whole story all i know is i have it it probably needs chains it definitely needs an ecm and maybe now it's just time to snatch that vr6 out and put it in something a little more fun than an automatic cc so this is one of those cases that kind of bums you out that you don't have a definitive answer but unfortunately that's how it goes sometimes with that i'm going to wrap it up hope you guys enjoyed this thank you so much for watching and i'll talk to you next time also complete change of scenery yellow cars in the shop blue cars in the shop we're expecting some storms tonight so i got to keep the girls protected safe and sound inside the shop the miata will be coming in next and don't worry the mark 3 is safely tucked away too

Channel: HumbleMechanic

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Id: 6SfGDdhFFWY

Length: 17min 42sec (1062 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021