7.3 powerstroke maintenance and upgrades for long term

all right so we are gonna talk today about what you have to do to work on your 7/3 and keep it running because listen a lot of you guys think hey man I'll just go get myself a new truck and again if you want to get a new Ford I highly wouldn't recommend it because the new six oh six or six 7s they do really suck so we're going to talk about 7/3 how to keep it running things look for and maintain on your 7/3 you know I mean everybody knows that the basics you know oil change keep your air filter change that's one thing people make a lot of mistakes on this keeping that air filter clean but we're not going to talk about those things we're any talk about the some of the common problems with a 7-3 that happened and could cost catastrophic failure or oil leaks and things like that and things to prevent and to get your motor to run a litter I'm not going to talk much about mods for upgrading the motor I'm more of a factory keep it original person so there's a couple things you want to do you can do to two that aren't gonna hurt anything aren't gonna that you can do to give yourself a little bit more power okay so one of them one of the things that goes out on the 7/3 if you haven't had it go out yet is common is the turbo pedestal seals so down below the turbo there's a pedestal down there there there it is you can see that pedestal below it's in the middle of that ring for pulling the engine it's that pedestal beyond below there the seals below that and sometimes between there and the turbo like to leak oil and typically the ones below and what happens is there's a little also there's a little normally there's a flapper that's gone that part right there was a little arm that comes down and goes to an actuator that's inside that pedestal and sometimes that Lakes oil so what I did on mine is I replaced it with the if you notice I do not have that little arm on mine and the pedestal itself does not have that little valve that goes on the side that leaks so if you are doing that if you if you want to prevent that leak and also give yourself a little bit more power what you do is you replace it with the non flapper cast iron in piece here for the turbo and and then replace your pedestal with the non flapper valve setup it's about 90 bucks or something like that maybe 190 I can't remember it wasn't that much compared to buying a new truck it's cheap so it did give me a little bit more low-end boost so that's kind of one of the things that's truck seems to be lacking the most of but it's really not too bad okay the other things that I had to replace on mine if you notice right here these are the high-pressure lines for the for the heads to pressurize your heads because your injectors are part hydraulic and part electric so this line right here is you've you noticed the original ones are braided steel and you think wow they're bright it's still so I never need to replace them oh no no no they break and when it goes it will blow oil everywhere all over your engine and so what I did is I upgraded these the ones you get on eBay they're about there are 5000 pounds about 160 hundred seventy dollars for set and it replaces the original ones with a basically such a high pressure line that you're probably never gonna have to replace it again so if you notice those are 5,000 pound pressure if you see that 50 300-pound pressure 206 366 bar that says yeah 366 tomorrow so I replace it with those and some guys made those up and sells them on eBay they're a great great product because mine did my did blow up and within a mile I had oil about a gallon of oil leaked out before I could get pulled over so you only have what 3 gallons in here so might be burning up your motor or just because you were too cheap to replace those in advance so if you've got an older one replace those with the new lines it'll save your motor and save you a roadside problem in a tote bill because pretty much there's not a lot of people that have those in stock is than the dealer and you're gonna be telling it because you don't have any parts so anyway the next things you want to do and to look for on your on your 7/3 is your underneath here you have your oil cooler now for some reason these like to blow the oil cooler seals and they start to start to leak oil so you'll be starting to see oil leaks on this side of your engine you have to take out that old cooler there's farms out there at how to replace all those seals if you want to prevent the oil leak you can do it in advance and it'll you maintain that so that doesn't leak so it's like a long tube underneath the truck thank you video of its like not really it's kind of buried in there especially if you have 4x4 like this truck does because like I said you definitely don't want to buy a new one yeah but if in you know the older ones these are much better than the new trucks they do have some issues but not near as many as the new trucks do the transmission is more of the issue on the older all the Fords so that's why I have a Chevy for my main driver because it has an Allison and I have less problems with the Duramax diesel and Allison combination than they do with the Ford but this is a bucket truck so you know it's gonna it's gonna be here for a while not to get rid of it okay if you notice in this video right here you see that bellows behind the down tube there another thing that goes out on the Ford on the 73 is you'll notice sometimes in when it's cold or whatever you'll fire up the motor and if you have the hood open you'll see a puff of black smoke for a second we know how when you normally fire it up they would come off the tailpipe and what happens is it starts to leak leak behind here a little bit exhaust now you might think well that's not a big deal but what it does is that you lose some of your low-end boost and like I said that's the biggest lagger on this truck is the low-end boost is if you notice they the bottom end they start to really when you rev up about to mid rpms is when you really get your power the Duramax I get it right off a vital so it's a little different as far as that goes but like I said it's not a bad engine it just got its issues so if you've got your turbo off I don't know I didn't do this with the engine in the truck my pistons cracked so which is another thing that might happen if you pulling a lot of weight all the time it doesn't seem to happen on the regular motors when you're just you know when you're not pulling weight all the time but I've been looking at forums and found that a lot of them have cracked Pistons that pulling weight all the time so not just occasional polling wait all the time phone wait that might be an issue sometime and it's worth rebuilding a motor because you're not going to get a better Ford truck if you want a Ford okay and so though that that crossover - in the back what it does is it'll leak and and it's because it's a rigid connection and the new ones have the bellows and replace that with the one with the bellows and that will pretty much be a good fix for that the other thing they tends to leak oil if you've got a leak in the back at the engine behind the cylinder heads because of the heat from the exhaust right there there's those plugs there's plugs in the back of the head for the high pressure oil and then they're not normally supposed to be removed but they're there as like I think a boring plug for something I can't remember I had the heads off and I don't recall but there's a born there's a plug back in there and those tend leak oil it's from the oil rings and you can actually do an in car repair and fix that by just removing it down tube because it down - it's right here the down tube where it goes down the head and those longings get hot kind of a whoops missed one on that one so that's why it does it okay so so those are a couple of the main things that go wrong and that you can get fixed and like I said most of the stuff is very small things that go wrong with this motor otherwise they're pretty darn strong engine as far as the build of it the stuff that's inside the motor is pretty strong a lot of external things that I think our engineer pretty poorly but those are usually afford things not international anyway so those are just a few things that you might want to look at let me see if I can think of a couple others if you're looking at buy one of these the best one is the was the 73 and stick shift training and you're gonna have less issues with their automatic okay well the other issue that you run into I ran into at about buck fifty miles was and some people were saying they get more than three hundred thousand like I said again it depends on the way you're pulling is the injectors so a lot of people have problems with Colt starts on these trucks because of issues with the with the with the glow plug things so if you do replace your glow plugs make sure that you go with the original motor craft they're made by a German company glow plugs not Bosch the ones that they're probably okay I don't know if the Bosch are any good but I'm not sure but they're made by another German company and the ones that they put in these originally and go with the motor crap one original or don't put the Chinese ones in you know you'll be paid in life because you'll break the ends off and bus you know bus Pistons I've heard of guys doing that so stay with original if you do continue to have problems that's usually the circuits with your with your glow plug relays and stuff like that I don't know anything about that I haven't had that issue at all but I have had cold start problems and the cold start problems that I had were not from the we're not from the glow plugs not getting hot they were actually from the injectors going bad so periodically make sure that you get a system to actually buzz test your injectors and check them and make sure that you don't have any one's going weak now some guys will say oh well if they're if they're bad then it runs on you know seven cylinders or six cylinders or whatever if you got a bad injector well that's if they're really really bad but if they're marginally bad what it does is I want to try to explain it to you is theirs remember a hydraulic portion of the injector and there's a electric part of the injector and when the hydraulic part starts to wear it won't do the proper assistance and so when it's cold sometimes it takes a lot more cranking to get the oil pressure on the top end up high enough to have the electric part of the injector assist enough to pull open the injector far enough so we'll so in other words when you first start your motor and it's cold really cold out and maybe it's 40 degrees or less some of you guys might be in the zeros or whatever just below zero I don't know I don't live in a place like that but it was like 4 degrees or less I would have issues with this truck would start up and would run on just a number of cylinders maybe three or four cylinders and then as it warmed up and ran for a little while then all of a sudden I start kicking out more cylinders and then all of a sudden they'd run fine but also in with that I had less low in power so it would you know right out of the hole it would give me you know it'd have a lot more lag like a turbo lag and then it would rev up to about mid rpms about say 2200 2500 and then all of a sudden the truck would take off and I'd have all this top-end you know between 2200 and 3500 it would be screaming and then you know it would be bah you know kind like a two-stroke dirtbike with bad rings so that's kind of the symptoms if you're having that problem take a look at the injectors get get a buzz test I would just by I have the audit and an ingenuity program for Ford and I'd use that to test mine so test those injectors make sure they're all buzz and really strong and if there are any of them bad just go ahead and replace them and you know not near as expensive the Chevy and sectors but those you guys who were saying ragging on the Duramax I've had to replace my injectors on my Duramax I've had to also replace them on the 7/3 so there's no better no difference I haven't had any you know they both haven't lasted me very long oh that's because the oil you use well that's not really true it's just engineering it was you know some guys were lucky they get two hundred three hundred thousand miles of a set of injectors some guys get on 150 I got 150 and that's just the way it worked out so it's kind of a crapshoot so anyway because everything's been pretty well maintained as far as long as I've had the truck and usually the phone companies are really good on their oil changes and stuff like that they may not do very good service but there are oil changes it's so like that are pretty regular so anyway that's a few of the items that I've had go out on mine the other thing that goes out is of course this wonderful little vacuum pump right here and that's something that you can buy now on eBay really cheap and so if your winds are blowing only through your like through the going through the defrost vents only then more than likely this little fellas gone out and you need to replace it so anyway I will talk to you guys in the next video just a couple pieces of advice not a bad engine as far as long-term goes if you do have an issue with your Pistons cracking at some point make sure that you get the not the ones from Ford make sure you get them directly from Molly because they are updated and they didn't update them because they haven't had any issues all right so all the guys say um well that's yours you you just you just you know one-in-a-million shot if that was true then they wouldn't have updated the castings so they did update the castings and they are way bigger way more power way stronger than the old ones and like I said it's worth doing the rebuild if you're gonna rebuild it put new Pistons in please it will save you a lot of hassle talk to you on the next video big job to rebuild the motor on this

Channel: Mike Fn Garage

Views: 173,533

Keywords: ford p, powerstroke, ford, diesel, last longer, love my ford, I hate ford

Id: 4Da0ac4nHqo

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018