DODGE NITRO MISFIRE AND SMOKING FROM TAILPIPE DIAGNOSIS

[Music] hey guys what's up it's Eric with advanced level automotive welcome back to another video welcome back to another Cane study I just got to work this morning but uh on the way to work I actually was having some issues with my personal vehicle and maybe some of you guys already know this Dodge Nitro right behind me it's a 2007 Dodge Nitro with a 3.7 liter 6-cylinder engine I made a video a month or two ago about this had a cylinder number six misfire turned out it just needed an ignition coil so we replaced the coil trucks been driving okay since then but like I said on my way to work this morning this thing started misfiring really bad it was smoking out of the tailpipe and it smelled a lot like fuel so anyways I'm gonna go ahead and hook up the scan tool and see if we got any codes alright guys so we are inside the vehicle I've got my auto blink scan tool I'm gonna go ahead and hook it up but I figured while we have a minute just want to tell you guys a little backstory about this vehicle and why I'm stuck driving a Dodge Nitro right now I think I might have mentioned it in my last video but I didn't really give you a backstory because I know some of you guys might be questioning like why would an auto mechanic or someone who's knowledgeable in the automotive field ever drive a Dodge or Chrysler product and that's because you know it's very well known that the quality and the reliability of these vehicles really isn't that great especially the 3.7 motor now I'm sorry to anyone who's a Chrysler fan anyone who's a Dodge Jeep fan I know they're nice-looking vehicles but as far as the build quality these vehicles are just really subpar I hate to say that but that's just kind of the way it is man I mean you really can't deny that Chrysler products aren't probably some of the worst vehicles that you can hone if you're looking for reliability anyways guys to get to the story this vehicle actually belonged to a customer of mine and she brought it in because it was having a misfire on cylinder number five and so after a quick noses we were able to determine the the engine had a blown head gasket we removed the cylinder head definitely we found evidence of the blown head gasket so we went ahead and we put an estimate together for the lady and I mean when I say we put an estimate together and when we gave her a really fair price like I wasn't trying to overcharge her or anything but anyways I gave her the price and after a couple days of contemplating it she actually decided that she didn't want to put any more money into this vehicle because she had only owned it for about three years and in the time that she's owned the vehicle she said that she's had to do some major repairs and she just got tired of having to sink money into this thing and just a side note I wasn't her original mechanic this was actually the first time I was dealing with this lady I was actually recommended to her by a friend so she I guess she felt like the shop that she was at before really wasn't you know doing her right and anyway she brought it over here like I said we found out it had a blown head gasket she just was tired of putting money into the vehicle and so she decided she was just gonna junk it you know I even tried giving her the option of you know just letting us put it back together so she can drive it out of here but she didn't even want to pay for us to put it back together she just wanted to pay our teardown fee which was only a few hundred dollars for teardown and diagnostics so she did pay us for the teardown and the diagnostic she called one of those junk vehicle buyers and over the phone they told her they were gonna give her five hundred bucks and she said okay so she called them she came over to the shop and she was waiting on them to come pick up the vehicle and really at that point I felt like I mean if she was really ready to get rid of the vehicle I thought it was probably maybe a perfect opportunity for me to just kind of offer to buy the vehicle from her because it was already in my shop you know we took it apart they're only offering her 500 bucks I mean if I offer her something like 600 bucks and she takes it you know all I got to do is put a new head gasket on and put the cylinder head back on and I only paid 600 bucks for a running vehicle so that's what I did I offered her 600 bucks she called the junk vehicle buyer back and she told him to cancel and she ended up selling the vehicle to me for 600 bucks which you know I thought it was a good deal because $600 for a nice-looking vehicle I mean it's not a bad deal and I thought you know well this is a probably a perfect opportunity for me to get into maybe buying and selling some vehicles you know of course running a business running a shop you know you're always trying to figure out how to make money different ways because you know sometimes auto repair can be really slow pay I mean unless you're doing a lot of quick in-and-out work like brake jobs and strut jobs you know sometimes we don't get any of that sometimes we're stuck doing jobs that are just they take a long time you know jobs like replacing a transmission or doing an engine or replacing turbos you know things like that like those are jobs that take a lot of time and they pay but it just takes a while to pay anyway like I said I thought maybe this is probably a good opportunity to get into buying and selling cars I only pay $600 for the truck you know let's get it put back together and see if we can't maybe sell this thing so that was my idea now here comes the interesting part of the story at the time I had somebody working for me that really wasn't working too well for me because this guy I mean everything that he touched he seemed to just mess it up I mean I don't know if you have you ever known anyone that everything they touch they just they get up and I mean the thing is that I really tried to give this guy the benefit of the doubt I mean I'm a really nice guy so I really kind of dragged it on for probably a lot longer than I should have because it really got to the point to where I didn't really want him working on customers vehicles anymore because he was just costing me too much money I would put him to do a job and he would end up breaking something and then the job would take twice as long and then it would cost twice as much and then I would lose money so I really didn't want to fire the guy you know I was trying to give him a chance because he was a good friend of mine so I thought well you know what we have this Dodge Nitro that we need to put back together because he was actually the one that took it apart so I did have him do the disassembly removal of the cylinder head because he said he was capable of doing it so I was like okay do it so anyways because he got to a point that I didn't want him working on customers vehicles it was just me and my brother working on all the vehicles in the shop so we were we were really busy I mean we were balls to the wall and so I just I did not have time to deal with this Dodge Nitro so I put him on it now that's probably the biggest mistake I could have ever made and yes I regret this mistake but it happened I'm not gonna dwell on it but I feel like I just really want to tell you guys a story because it is it is a really interesting story so anyway I had him put the cylinder head back on to the vehicle with the new head gasket of course he put the timing and everything together you know he was able to put everything together and we got the vehicle running so when I went to start the vehicle up started up ran fine man I was happy so I started to pull the truck out of the shop and while I was pulling the truck out of the shop I heard some really loud ugly grinding noise and then all of a sudden the truck shut off so I thought man this can't be good so anyways I had to go in there we had to remove the valve covers to figure out where the hell that noise was coming from and it turns out that this guy forgot to torque down one of the camshaft gears so what ended up happening was that when I started it up it ran just fine but then the bolt on the camshaft gear started to back out and then the gear actually came away from the camshaft and then what it ended up doing was it sheared the pin off of the camshaft and it just grind it into the camshaft and it caused so much damage like three or four different valves got bent so we had to take everything back apart I had to buy a new camshaft we had to replace like three or four different intake and exhaust valves on a couple different cylinders and we had to put everything back together so keep in mind I wasn't doing any of this work I was trusting that okay he made a mistake I'll let him slide let's get the new camshaft let's get the new valves let's get everything put back together and let's get this thing running and to be honest with you the guy actually he just kept telling me to trust him that it was just a mistake you know he won't make it again and I think he was trying to take this as an opportunity to prove himself which I should have nipped it in the bud a long time ago but I didn't so anyways I had him take it back apart he replaced the bent valves that were in the cylinder head replaced the camshaft replaced the camshaft gear and we got everything back together up and running and I thought we were good to go but I was wrong so anyways the day that we got the truck running I thought awesome I drove it out of the shot up and actually I drove it home and we actually had a party to go to that night so I I said let's take the truck my wife and I we got in the truck and the party you know was like 20 miles away so we had to get up on the freeway got up on the freeway mind you this is at like 8 o'clock at night so it's already dark and if you ever been on a freeway in Houston Texas I mean people are always speeding down the freeway it's not somewhere you want to break down but that's exactly what happened so we were driving down the freeway and all of a sudden the oil pressure light came on and I thought oh man this can't be good so I tried to exit off of the freeway but before I could exit the engine actually locked up on me and I mean the engine stalled it was locked up we were stuck on the side of the freeway I had to call a tow truck it was a pretty scary ordeal needless to say my wife was not happy we had the truck towed back to the shop and the next day I had to figure out what was going on so anyways after tearing it back down I actually had my brother do the inspection on it because I knew I could trust my brother and what he actually found out was on the timing chain tensioners the bolts that the guy had put on there were not the correct length they were too long so the chain tensioners were not sealing up against the block it was causing like a really big internal oil leak and when I confronted the guy about it he was like oh you know I misplaced the bolts and I just had to get some bolts out of the bolt bin that we had in the back of the shop and he said I thought these bolts would fit but the problem was is when he was tightening it down the bolt bottomed out inside because it was a little bit too long and it wasn't actually pressing the tensioner up against the cylinder block so it was losing a lot of oil pressure internally anyway is the extent of the damage was pretty bad I mean when we pulled the valve cover off the camshaft on the driver side cylinder had had completely melted and what I mean by that is that the caps that actually bolt down the camshaft had gotten so hot from not having any lubrication they actually snapped and broke off so that cylinder head was and that was actually the same cylinder head that we had replaced the gasket on anyways at that point you know I was trying to decide what to do I really wanted to get the vehicle up and running because I figured you know hey if I put you know a few more hundred dollars into it you know I can at least try to break even or I didn't want to lose out on this thing which I probably should have stopped there but I didn't anyways I ended up buying another cylinder head which we found out of salvage yard so we're gonna go ahead and put that on there but again guys to be honest with you I mean my brother and I at the time were just so busy with other jobs that we had to finish I didn't have time to actually work on the nitro myself and I didn't want to take my brother who was doing other work that was making us money to come work on the nitro so again I had this conversation with the guy you know who was working on this truck and you know he told me that he was sorry you know once again and he said you know let me fix it for you I want to get it right he said please just give me an opportunity to prove myself I want to show you that I can do it and so I said fine you know let's try it one more time so I let him put it back together my head hurts just thinking about it let me tell you what happened next this guy was installing the camshaft onto the cylinder head that we had just bought and he was torquing down the camshaft caps that hold down the camshaft to the cylinder head and he went over to the computer pulled up the torque spec on all data and it said 98 inch pounds that was a torque spec for those little bolts that hold down the caps to the camshaft tell me why this idiot sets the torque wrench foot-pound and then attempts to torque down the little 10 millimeter bolts to hold down the camshaft to 98 foot pound torque what do you think happened of course the bolt broke OH anyway so at that point we had a broken bolt inside of the cylinder head and mind you these cylinder heads are aluminum and when I say they're aluminum I don't know what aluminum Dodge or Chrysler uses but that stuff is soft I mean the cylinder head on this thing is a really soft aluminum we tried to drill that piece of broken bolt out of the cylinder head but we just could not I mean it just ended up going sideways and all we ended up doing was ruining the cylinder head that we had just purchased so we had to find another cylinder head now this is where things got really interesting because if you know anything about these 3.7 motors these cylinder heads love to drop the valve seats so I actually set this guy who was working on the truck so pretty much every salvage yard here in Houston Texas trying to look for a good cylinder head and everywhere he went every single cylinder head that he found how to drop bow seat so at a certain point I had to just decide to buy a cylinder head with the drop bow see anyways we bought the cylinder head with the drop valve seat I sent it off to the machine shop I had them install new valve seats and refurbished the cylinder head at this point I had already put more money into this truck than I really was intending to do but I felt like there was no turning back at this point so anyways we got the refurbished cylinder head back from the machine shop and I had the guy reinstall the cylinder head on the motor now during the process of him putting the engine back together this time I was really having to babysit him and let me tell you this guy has some anger issues he's not patient he's very rough with everything he works on which is probably why he breaks everything he touches so anyways during the process of him putting it back together I was watching him every step of the way because at this point I really couldn't have anything else go wrong with this truck and this is where I found myself multiple times having to try to calm this guy down because he would go to try to remove something and it wouldn't come out and he would just wrestle it try to wrestle things to come off you know for example the crank pulley you know he had the puller on the crank pulley and he was trying to remove it but he couldn't get the puller to line up properly and so he was just fighting with it and tugging on it and trying to manhandle that thing out of there anyways in that process he actually ended up putting a hole in the radiator with the puller that he was using to try to pull the harmonic balancer off because he couldn't get it on there right and so he decided to take it back off but when he was taking it off in his frustration and anger yanked it off and the end of the puller actually put a hole in the damn radiator and at that point I just I hit my limit I couldn't handle it anymore I said I'm sorry don't touch this truck ever again don't touch any other vehicle in my shop again I really tried to give this guy a chance but it's just costing me way too much money way too much headache I just can't do it anymore you gotta go so anyway to make a long story short I ended up getting rid of him I had to have my brother put the engine back together of course we had to replace the radiator as well but after my brother put it back together I mean the truck was running fine everything after that I no longer had any issues and to be honest with you I really wish I would have just put my brother to do it to begin with because I know my brother would have done a good job he's very thorough and what he does I mean I taught him everything he knows as far as wrenching on cars so anyways guys that's the backstory to this vehicle I don't really want to go into any more detail you guys get the idea I ended up spending way more money and time into this vehicle than what it was worth this was supposed to be an easy put the cylinder head back on get the vehicle running and flip it make some money and move on but unfortunately it didn't turn out that way and now I'm kind of stuck driving this thing until I can get a buyer to give me what I want anyways guys let's get back to the diagnosis I got the scan tool hooked up let's check it out and see what we got alright guys so I've got my scan tool over here I'm just using the auto link just do a quick code scan the ignition is on we have two coves let's see what we got read codes store codes a po4 20 that's not good this thing's probably gonna need a catalytic converter let's see what other code we have and there we have it a Pio 306 cylinder number six misfire detective ok cylinder number six if you guys watch my previous video with this vehicle that was actually the same cylinder that it had a misfire wrong and I ended up replacing the coil now that I think was probably like a month or two ago and the vehicles been driving fine since then I mean it's highly unlikely that that brand new coil has a problem so let's go on to the hood let's check it out our guys so moving under the hood I've already done a preliminary visual check to make sure that we didn't have you know something as simple as an unplugged coil or an unplugged injector the connectors here look tight so I don't think our problem is going to be that simple now as far as the next step I mean there's a few different things that we can do you know we could probably try swapping coils or we can probably try doing a drop test but I think the first thing I want to do because it's really easy is I want to see if I can get a secondary ignition waveform pattern off of these ignition coils because if you pay attention these coils are actually two wire coils now you've heard me talk about this in other videos where ignition coils that have two wires the transistor driver is not built into the coil the transistor driver is actually built into the engine computer which is located right here so the nice thing about this style of ignition coil is that we can actually read the secondary ignition waveform pattern by looking at the control wire on the primary ignition now if you pay attention these two wires one of these two wires is going to be the same color on all of the coils and that's going to be the main power feed so if you look I believe this wire right here which is a brown wire is the same color wire on all of these coils so that's going to be the power feed and what we want to look at is going to be the control wire which is this wire right here which we're gonna be looking at cylinder number six which is back here the cylinder number six this wire is looks like green and orange so we're gonna go ahead and back probe this control wire and see if we can get a waveform alright guys so I've got my lab scope over here as you can see I have my back probe on that control wire I'm gonna go ahead and start the vehicle alright guys I just went to crank this thing for the first time and what I noticed is that it had a really extended cranking time so let me see if I can show you that again I don't know if you can hear that but this thing had a pretty extended crack let's go back onto the hood so we're back under the hood and I can definitely smell what smells like fuel or gasoline fumes coming from the tailpipe so anyways we got our back probe let's try to do this as quickly as possible because we want to minimize any damage that can happen to the catalytic converters I'm gonna go ahead and try to adjust this waveform see if we can get a good visual on it we go ahead and set a trigger for it let's zoom in let me move over that trigger I'm going to bring down the zero line to try to do this quickly alright so now we can see the secondary conditional waveform pattern now what I want you to pay attention to is the peak on the sparkline right here so you'll see that the peak on the sparkline is actually up high so let me go ahead and just brief this picture right here and then I'm gonna go ahead and shut the vehicle off alright guys so I just shut the vehicle off again we don't want to continue to run the vehicle with the misfire like this especially because I smell a lot of fuel coming out of the tailpipe I know we already have a code for a catalytic converter so it's probably gonna need a cat anyway but I don't want to deteriorate this cat any more than it already has been so anyways let's take a look at this capture right here you'll see this is the secondary ignition waveform pattern we were looking at again I wanted you to pay attention to the firing line right here and then pay attention to the spark line now this spark line right here if you look is actually pretty high it's pretty much equaling the firing line so this right here is an indication of a no fuel misfire scroll through the history take a look you'll see this one right here same thing I'm just kind of scrolling back in time here this is a captured image at this point right here this is what the waveform should look something like this where that spark line is lower than that firing line let's keep scrolling back see if I can find another one see that one there looks pretty normal let's go ahead and keep scrolling through see if we can find another one hopefully you guys can see sorry about the glare on the screen but again if you look at this one you'll see that high spark line again I'm going to kind of scroll through just try to give you guys different examples of what to look for again seeing this again keep sprawling you see this one right here we have that high spark line this is also an indication of a no fuel or fuel misfire so may I keep going show you a couple of them I just want to give you different examples look at that one right there again you see that high spark line you don't want to see this when you see this this is an indication of a misfire due to a fuelling problem so I think right now just by looking at this waveform we can determine the more than likely we don't have a problem with the ignition coil we more than likely have a problem with the fuel injector now I think that makes sense because we also had an extended crank period so it is possible that this injector might be leaking and what I mean by that is whenever you shut the vehicle off the fuel pressure in the fuel rail should stay pretty constant now fuel injectors it's stuck open it's going to be leaking down that pressure in the fuel rail and that's gonna cause you to have an extended crank whenever you go to start it up so I think the next thing we need to do is check that fuel injector and there's probably a couple different ways we can do that but I think what I want to do because it's pretty easy to gain access to the fuel injectors we're gonna go ahead and do a fuel injector balance test now in order to do the fuel injector balance test we need to let this engine cool off because what we don't want to do is try to run this test with the hot because that can cause our readings to be off and the reason for that is because whenever you release the fuel pressure in the fuel rail it can cause the fuel to vaporize which will throw off our readings so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna let this sit for an hour or so fuel injector balance test alright guys so I've got my setup ready to do an injector balance test if you look over here we have the scan tool it's connected we're gonna be using this to command the fuel pump relay on and if you look down here we have the fuel pressure gauge and this fuel pressure gauge we haven't connected directly to the fuel rail there's a Schrader valve right here this is where our Mo's is connected and over here I have the electronic fuel injector tester what this tester does is it allows us to command the injectors to pulse and what we're going to use this for is to test how much fuel each injector is flowing and the way we're going to do that is we're going to go ahead and activate the fuel pump and what that's going to do is it's going to bring us to our resting pressure once we reach our resting pressure we're going to activate the tool at each injector we're gonna watch to see how much pressure drops from the resting pressure so we're gonna do this one injector at a time and then we're going to compare how much of a pressure difference there is between the three injectors on this Bank so let's go ahead and move over to the scan tool all right so hopefully you guys can see the setup we have I'm gonna go ahead and command the fuel pump relay to come on we don't need any data pins all right so we are inside of the active test it says f1 to turn the fuel pump on and f2 to turn it off so pay attention to the gauge we're gonna get this to reach the resting pressure you see it's going up to 60 psi then we'll go ahead and shut it off and see where the resting pressure is and that does not look good okay that should not be happening we should not be losing all our pressure let me double check my connections here make sure I'm not leaking fuel anywhere no we're not leaking any fuel okay let's try that one more time we'll see if we can get this thing to reach a resting pressure get f1 you can see it goes up to 60 psi I'm gonna go ahead and shut it off and this thing should only drop maybe about 5 psi but you can see this gauge is going all the way down to 2-0 so it definitely looks like we have some type of fuel leak now I think at this point it would be pretty easy to say that we probably have a bad fuel injector maybe that fuel injector on the number six misfiring cylinder it's stuck open and what's happening is that it's just dumping fuel into the number six cylinder and that's probably what's causing it to misfire which I mean it makes sense because it's not holding resting pressure in the fuel rail and that may be why we have an extended crank I mean I was really hoping to show you guys the fuel injector balance test using my little tool but at this point we really can't even run the test because we can't even hold resting pressure so at this point I think the next step we need to do is go ahead and unbolt the fuel row pressurize the system and then see if that fuel injectors leaking so let me go ahead and unbolt this fuel row alright guys so I've got the fuel rail unbolted was actually pretty easy to do there's only four screws holding down this fuel rail I'm gonna go ahead and pop it up well actually check that out pay attention to that number six fuel injector I'm gonna lift up on this fuel rail pay attention to that fuel injector there is a bunch of fuel in there they're coming out to remove these coils to get this fuel rail off completely alright guys so I went ahead and removed the ignition coils as you can see I already have the fuel rail all the way raised up it's pretty evident where our problem is you look down these are the holes where the fuel injectors go if you look at this back one you can see it's actually full of gasoline so I'm not sure if the intake valve is closed or not if it's closed and that means the cylinder head is just full with fuel if that intake valve is open then that means the entire cylinder is full of gasoline so definitely we're going to need to remove a spark plug and crank the engine over so that we can blow all this gasoline out of the cylinder because we don't want to hide you lock the engine if you look up here there's the fuel injector and it's pretty evident I don't even think I need to pressurize this you can see these other fuel injectors are dry hopefully you guys can see these injectors are dry and this back one over here still still dripping it's like I said I really don't think I need to pressurize it but I guess just to show you guys I'm gonna go ahead and do it I've got the scan tool over here I'm going to command the fuel pump on I'm only gonna do it for a second because I'm pretty sure this thing's gonna spray a lot of fuel I'm gonna turn it on all right that fuel injector is leaking big-time look at the fuel injector next to it you'll see that there's no fuel coming out of this thing and this fuel injector is just leaking like crazy so definitely this is going to need a fuel injector I'm gonna go ahead and get one on order replace it like I said we're gonna need to remove the spark plug crank the engine over to get all this gasoline out of the cylinder and we'll go from there all right guys so we got the new injector installed we're gonna go ahead and start it up we got to burn that extensive fuel out run it to the Sinclairs out all right so the engine is now running smooth no more smoke coming out of the tailpipe misfire is gone we went ahead and clear the check engine light check engine light is gone also so that's definitely a fix like I said before we put that injector in I went ahead and I removed the spark plug and I crank the engine over so that we could blow the gasoline out I really wish I would have recorded it because it actually blew out a lot of gasoline I mean I cranked that thing over and it just went boom but unfortunately I wasn't filming so I just I can't show you I'm sorry guys but anyway I'm gonna go ahead and drive it home it's already time for us to close up so I'm ready to get out of here oh and by the way one more thing I forgot to add is that we are gonna have to change the oil because I'm pretty sure with the fuel injector leaking like that we probably have gasoline inside the engine oil so the engine oil is gonna need to get replaced I'm probably have to do that tomorrow morning but that's just one more thing on my list for this engine anyways guys thank you for watching the video I hope you enjoyed it I hope you found it useful I hope you found it informational if you did make sure to give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed these case studies please make sure to check out my channel for all the other case studies I have if you haven't already done so please subscribe to the channel make sure you hit that notification bell and I'll see you the next one thanks [Music] [Music]

Channel: ADVANCED LEVEL AUTO

Views: 19,218

Rating: 4.9089432 out of 5

Keywords: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, dodge, chrysler, jeep, 3.7, jeep liberty, jeep patriot, jeep compass, ignition coil test, fuel injector test, stuck fuel injector, gasoline smell, engine stalls, engine dies, engine cuts out, p0300, p0301, p0302, p0303, p0304, p0305, p0306, long crank time, extended crank time, engine wont start, no start, fuel pump, chrysler quality problems, cylinder head valve seat, spark plug, jeep cherokee, fiat, automotive training courses, head gasket, auto school

Id: qJ5NE0sB1Ww

Length: 30min 45sec (1845 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 10 2019