CAR WIZARD Tears Apart the Ford 5.4 3 Valve V8

[Applause] [Music] welcome back to the wizard shop and some of you wanted to say I wanted to hear the engine run I want to see it run after you're done everything went together well everything went perfectly and before it would run and violently I mean just sit there the engine would rock now it sits steady and smooth and revs smooth everything's back like it should be so there'll be a happy customer so I still would rather have this one this is the ticket if I had my if I had money and I could afford any car I wanted that would be a Murcielago this is a cool car and all but this is with the ticket right here so anyways some of you made some comments in the comment section about the engine being dirty and that's the way I received this car maybe he'd been driving got dust and dirt on it and some of you said you should just clean that up you should wipe all that up and clean it up but a lot of you don't understand in the automotive business that there's a lot of precautions you have to take I know Leo's a cool guy he wouldn't mind if I did clean it but I don't touch people's cars and do stuff other than specifically what I've been asked to do the quickest way to have a customer right square in the middle of your behind is when you start wiping stuff and start clean and stuff and he says I have a guy that does that I have a special person that does that why did you clean my car why did you mess with my car you don't do that in this business you do exactly what you've been told to do and nothing more that's for liability that's just the way it is so anyways the car is done he'll be happy he'll be back soon from Qatar that's where he's at and you'll have a stable of beautiful running cars waiting for them so we've talked about some of my favorite cars I enjoy working on I really enjoy working on the Vipers but I have a story for you today I have one or the cars that I really really am not happy about I really don't like working on them but I've done a lot of them so we're going to show you that today [Music] well obviously I'm not an engine I'm sure a hell of a lot more reliable than the one that was in here we're going to tell you about that today I've got evidence I've got documented data and when you're done watching this video some of you are going to be enthralled some of you're going to be amazed and some of the Ford guys are probably going to be pissed at me that's fine facts are facts this is a 2007 Lincoln Mark LT it's owned by one of my prominent customers John and he has several vehicles he's had him in here a couple of Bentley's he has and BMWs Mercedes Porsches all kinds of cool cars we're halfway through an engine exchange on this one we've got a brand new engine waiting and the old one sitting aside and I'm going to move over to the old engine and go over some details with you this is the engine out of it this is a 5.4 3-valve triton and to me and the years of experience I have I've been doing mechanic work for 17 years this is the trashiest piece-of-crap motor I've ever seen and you can take that to the bank this is the 12th one I've done $6,200 a pop figure that up that's over 70 to 80 thousand dollars in replaced engines what happens on these is it's got passages that feed oil to the cam phasers and people frequently oh I'll just put new cam phasers or I'll try this or I'll try that it's not the fix you can't I mean you can fix it but it costs them as much or more than replacing the engine poor oil changes will cause this and I'll show you here in a minute to sludge that's in this engine and it's not from the customer who currently owns the car it's probably from previous way back before he owned it but it clogs some passages in here and it doesn't feed enough oil pressure to the phasors and they clack and they rat and there's nothing you can do but just get the motor out of there and replace it look at all the sludge it's in here look I can stick my finger in it just look at that every little tiny little passage that's in this engine is clogged with this crap and that's the that's the design flaw in these engines the passages are too small it doesn't take anything to clog them and when you have this going on in an engine it's a sure shot way to make it unusable modern engines today are not tolerable of neglected oil changes really three to five thousand miles you should be changing your oil I don't care what your service thing says on your dash and this is proof well I can go 10,000 miles no you can't because this is what happens right here a lot of people say well why can't you just fix this why can't you put new cam phasors a new timing chain what good does that do when there's still no oil pressure there to operate them that does nothing and I've seen this scenario over and over and over I've got $1,500 into this or 2,000 in two timing components and cam faders and it still rattles and I'm like really I like I said this is the 12th one and I'm sure there'll be many more I like doing these I've gotten used to it I know exactly how to get these out get the other ones in fast and it puts money in the bank so people say Tyler's my college fund for my kids I would say this is now we're gonna hop over to the new engine and I'm going to show you some more data so you might hear some noise I got Scott over here he's working on this Viper for my customer Bob we're doing a whole bunch of work to it and it's in pretty good shape but it needs a little bit more work and make it just that much better so you might hear some banging her stuff going around he's over there working this is the brand-new 5.4 very common sight for me I've seen a lot of these I typically would use a Jasper engine that's what I've used in the past but this this customer particularly one to purchase his own engine and he purchased it from powertrain products I've read good reviews and I don't see why that wouldn't be an option here but uh looks like a good motor to me we're gonna be putting this in and take care of this problem once and for all for him he can drive it and enjoy this truck on the old one half the motor was not even working he had gotten bad enough where all four cylinders on that bank weren't even firing one of the issues I had with a customer is that and I've had I had this issue every time they say what can we do to fix this problem and I say new engine six to two hundred dollars and I think I'm full of it so they go check around they call their buddies they call this guy they call that guy they go to different shops and they get the same story and finally they come back to me and they say I can't believe it it has to have a new engine to fix this problem but finally they relent which I hate that they have to realize I hate to have to do this for somebody other than it makes me money but I don't enjoy seeing somebody have to empty their bank account like this and a question I get is how is it that people on the road today don't know about this problem how crappy these Ford engines are and I don't know I don't know why more people don't know I see see them selling all the time there's a reason why you go to an auction or to a dealership a Dodge or a Chevy is what let's just say eighteen thousand or twenty thousand dollars for a good used one in the f-150 is you one for eleven there's a reason for that this is known this is a known problem just not by the public and I'm here to tell you about it hopefully it'll save you some grief I'm not on going on a rampage to be a jerk I really hope you guys will take heed to some of this don't don't buy one of these you can find these engines and navigators there's f-150s mark lt's excursions different there's there's a whole bunch of motors that uses three valve 5.4 so I'm going to show you now some more evidence to support my claims this is an account I have with identify you could type in a an engine code or a complaint or a problem and it comes up with what's called pattern failures it's not 99 100% guarantee but it's pretty close I'd say over 90 that that's probably what the problem is and that doesn't mean you that's what the part you go order that means that you know now where to diagnose where to where to where to focus your your efforts and it really saves a lot of time this is something I do every time I deal with this situation with a customer who doesn't believe what I'm saying is true and after they read these papers there's no more question anymore they don't question me at all so you type in the codes you p zero zero one two or some of the other codes that are listed with this issue and it comes up with a guaranteed confirmed fix not a maybe not it comes up with the absolute fix of what shops all across the country are doing and what solved the problem these are shops in a five or six state area they've all reported replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replaced the engine replace the engine there's all these guys listed these are shops all across the country replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine replace the engine anyways you guys get the point I want to show you it wanted to print off 29 pages I didn't let it go that far I just plan it off a whole bunch of them anyways replace the engine replaced the engine how can you refute that how can you fight that it's all across the whole country that right there it's just a small print out of it actually listed over 500 confirmed fixes that's not the ones that been reported that's just the ones in the shops that just had taken time to report it you could probably triple or quadruple that number there's our documentation for saying that's the confirm fix for this issue what makes you think that that engine there the brand-new one is gonna stay fixed just like I've told you on the old engines it can be fixed but you have to strip it down to the bare block and basically rebuild it yourself and you'll have as much money or more than just doing what we're doing here and a lot of your engine will still be the old parts these companies like Jasper and I'm pretty pretty sure with powertrain products and other companies when they have it all apart they'll go through make updates or modifications and to make it not do that again these people have a five-year warranty that comes with it you can purchase a seven-year warranty pretty sure it will run pretty good for them for a long time so if you have one of these it's fairly recent a fairly newness and you haven't had it very long make sure you're doing your oil changes I tell customers who have these engines afterwards even though they've done the updates and even though I tell them just do a three thousand mile oil change it might be a little bit more expensive up front but in the long run it'll keep it clean as you've seen in here it's just filled with sludge the second problem on these 5.4 engines which make some pieces of crap spark plugs these are a two-piece design to the bottom in jacket let me get this one out this one came out pretty good so as you can see the dark portion is separate than the glite portion here it's two two-piece and it's very common that you go to take these out and the dark portion is left behind in the head it breaks off and then you have to have special tools and strap extraction tools to get it out and typically we charge one hour per spark plug to remove these when they break off and I have seen customers that have tried to do their own spark plugs they break all eight of them off in there and it'll take us days to get them all out a couple of three days because you can't focus on one car constantly you got to go to this car in that car come back to this one we let us that stuff soak sometimes if we if they leave some of the spark plugs in we'll soak them and sometimes we're lucky and they come out but why in the world would be I mean there clearly was no engineering intelligence in this engine they they just kind of in Maya in my opinion I'm not an engineer but in my uneducated opinion I would say that they just threw this together and threw it out the door and said hey it runs and drives it'll last - warranties over get it out the door that's what this is so here pretty soon we're gonna be putting this new engine in and he'll have a good running truck again and that'll be the happy part of this whole scenario he'll get to go drive his truck it'll drive fine and do like it should and and even though he'll have to pay a lot of money to get it that way I guess it's cheaper than buying a new truck so I look forward to getting it going for them and making them a happy customer so the purpose of this video is to help you guys out there you're in the market for a vehicle just like I did with my Avalanche I showed you a vehicle that's would be a great choice if you're in the market this here shows you a vehicle that would be a very poor choice if you see these for sale and the guy and you know the salesman oh we can work your deal kind of like crazy d we can get you into this today and no don't walk away don't walk away run run as fast as you can away from these things they're horrible like I said I've been 12 of them so if you do have to have this done it's not something's gonna be done in a couple of days it pays 24 hours to do this job and that's if you stay on it without taking a lunch without taking a break without a phone call without nothing it's likely going to be here for a whole week and that's if you have the engine here you get the old engine out you've got the other one ordered maybe there's a shipping delay maybe for some reason they didn't have enough engines and it's gonna take a few days to get one out the door your vehicle your vehicle your navigator your f-150 your Mark LT whatever but very likely it's going to be in the shop for at least a week if not two weeks so that's kind of the kind of a raw deal here but that's just the way it is so anyways I wanted to thank you guys for watching I didn't want to go on a tirade and be a jerk but I just can't believe just like anybody else who comes through the door I can't believe that this would this is in the public for sale on Lots all across the country it's just really sad on a lighter note if there's some of the tools you've seen in some of the videos that I've been using there's an Amazon affiliate page where I have a bunch of tools listed to help you guys out click the subscribe button keep up the good work guys with the comments up and seen a lot of good comments and I've been really really pleased with that so anyways thanks for watching and I'll give you guys an update on this very likely when we get it done I'm going to give it back to the customer he's going to want it pretty soon so but I will give you guys an update on it so again thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: Car Wizard

Views: 1,015,788

Keywords: car wizard, david long, hoovies garage, tyler hoover, car issues with tyler hoover, chrisfix, omega auto clinic, scotty kilmer, car repair, car maintenance, tavarish, Doug DeMuro, vehicle virgins, watchjrgo, jalopnik, smoking tire, samcrac, 5.4 V8, Ford 5.4

Id: xcN_WcGr4BU

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 30 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/PlatinumGoon]

I’m a Ford guy but I’d never own one either. The other problem is they’re pretty gutless too. However from ‘11 up Ford has really stepped up their game with the 5.0s and ecoboosts

Edit: If you want a gutless reliable pickup get the 5.4 2V Fords from 03 and behind

[u/nukelauncher95]

I don't agree it's the worst engine ever, but it isn't great. Chrysler made some dogshit V6s and V8s back in the day.

[u/THEREALCABEZAGRANDE]

Its absolutely not the worst engine ever, lol. Besides the plug issue they were an okay engine. Hundreds of thousands of them saw hundreds of thousands of miles each in fleet trucks, cant be all that bad. They made okay power and decent torque fairly reliably for super cheap, and that's all they were ever intended to do. There are many, MANY worse engines out there.

[u/the_last_carfighter]

How many 5.4's are out there? Millions? Some of them could have had a genuine problem, but take into account that car wizard is blaming sludge for the problem. Sludge 9/10 times is neglect. So the 5.4 should be blamed for being too delicate for a specific kind of neglect.

[u/pigeonholepundit]

Keep in mind this is only the 3 valve models. Earlier (pre-2004) models had the 2 valve engine which didn't suffer from this problem.

Edit: changed 2003 to 2004

[u/gchance92]

Having an f150 and an expedition both with 5.4s I can confirm that those spark plugs are an absolute bitch to deal with. Going into replacing the plugs I let each one soak in penetrating lubricant for about an hour or so before removing them. On my f150 I had 2 plugs break on me. Luckily in easily accessible areas. However my expedition had it break in the worst possible area (far back passenger side) which was an absolute bitch to replace. The extraction tool really comes in handy and was worth the 100 something bucks I had paid for it. All in all I believe it took me anywhere from 5-6 hours to service each one of my trucks. This is definitely not a fun maintenance routine to do on these engines but when you can buy all your plugs and coil packs and an extraction tool if you dont already have one for under $300 versus $900 for a shop to do plugs only (more if a plug breaks) it's worth doing yourself.

[u/GiveMeAMuffin]

I'm not sure id say worst engine ever. Yes the spark plug design was completely short sighted and terrible. Some of them were definitely under powered. I can also first hand say I've heard so many of these engines with a loud ticking noise that begs the question of quality. However there are many engines that went 250K+ no problem. What i do agree with is doing oil changes sooner then later on these engines. 3k-5k at the latest. I think all the big three trucks all had some major well documented drive train related issue at some point, and really i think it just comes down to luck. Do your research and find the best model year with the least amount of problems.

[u/[deleted]]

Blown spark plugs, cam phasers and timing chain issues is what I heard. Back when I was looking for a decent used truck, my go to choice would have been Ford F250, but I heard not so good things about the 5.4L Triton. Went with the turbo-diesel Cummins in the Ram and everything falls apart around the engine, but the engine is for sure robust as any ever made. If you go with Ford, avoid the 5.4L and get the 7.3L diesel powerstroke.

[u/azgrown84]

It's a good engine, it just has some fragile and expensive parts. And the fact that Ford built about as many 5.4 engines as Toyota built Camrys, so obviously you're gonna hear about a lot more failures than if it were a less popular model. That said, the modern Ford V8s blow it out of the water in every way imaginable.