Ford 5.4L 3v Engine Noises You Shouldn’t Ignore: How To Tell When a Timing Job is Really Needed

[Music] hey guys what's up welcome back to the for tech make you Loco Channel today we're working on hell you guessed it another five four three valve timing job and it got me thinking about a question I get a lot and that is how do I know when it's time to sink the money into my 5 4 3 valve and do a full timing set work up on their new phasors guides chains high volume oil pump all that good stuff when's it time to sink the money into the engine well the simple answer the quick answer is all 5 4 3 valves need this service at one point or another about every hundred thousand miles the old parts and by 150 thousand miles with the new parts ok the first warning sign that a lot of people dismiss is a startup rattling happens around 2 3 seconds so they dismiss it they let it go over and over again well this engine right here is a prime example of why you don't want to ignore that startup rattle and I want to show you what's happening inside your engine the damage that's being done and it'll get you thinking totally different about that startup rattle and how it's starving the engine for oil let's go check it out now before we get into why that startup rattle conditions causing internal engine damage let's go over a couple other common noises associated with the 5 4 3 valve engine now the very first one that's the most common is a hot idle knock and that's caused by the phaser locking pin inside so you'll feel it and hear it mostly up here on the valve cover in the very front you can touch it and kind of feel that knock on the valve cover and it only happens at hot idle so you go off ILs a nine-hour RPMs are higher and the noise will go away now that one right there is not detrimental to engine operation or durability it's just fine I've never seen a ford fazer come apart and the actual locking pins inside of there just had a little bit of a clearance issue and it's causing that noise at idle actually I can bring it over here to why I took apart so I can show you guys what's going on on the side now again don't take one is the part ever because it's very dangerous when that spring unwinds it's very very dangerous but I want to show you inside of here so here's all the veins for the phaser and then here's the little spring and nub here and then down inside of here this is the locking pin and you can see that's all it is right there that's it and it wears after a while and the housing down there wears and then when it's just sitting there at idle and it's locked in there it will knock knock knock and then get transmitted through the phaser which is heavy and then the camshaft so it makes it a louder than it actually is that one is nothing to worry about as long as you're using a ford phaser now the other one being any kind of slapping noise up front here so there's a constant slapping noise or change dragging noise from the front cover area up here you can just kind of isolate up to the front here you definitely want to get in there and fix it as soon as possible a lot of times the guides come apart chunks are missing then the chain starts hitting and slapping and grinding on the front cover even the oil pump and it's putting all that metal and all those chunks of plastic down in your wheel pan it's being pulled through the system it's blocking the oil pickup down there and it's starving the engine for oil not to mention all those metal fine fine metal particles believe me they get circulated through they're not always just sucked up cleaned by the filter and everything's a-ok they're going around in there destroying okay so you don't want to ignore any kind of slapping or grinding or chain dragging noises up front here now the other one being any kind of ticking either constant ticking or intermittent ticking from the heads here you see be able to isolate it going back with that screwdriver you'll screwdriver technique to listen for any kind noises down here on top the valve cover if you hear any of those noises it's the roller follower or lash adjuster and it can cause serious damage let me show you over here this is a cylinder head from a 2010 yea head higher eighty-five thousand miles on it but they let the roller follower actually degrade okay and I said that bearings in here a cam part it locked up and it got stuck cam lobe came around and spit it out and this is what's happened yeah it blew out the lifter out the side chunk got the casting in the head and of course it destroys the cam lobe you can see all damage right here so at first the the most common is for this to fail and then it seizes okay and that just starts chewing into the cam so you gotta replace the cam and in a worst-case scenario this happens and they were pulling the head it's expensive real quick if you ignore these kinds of noises and then last but not least the noise that everybody loves to ignore the start up rattle the reason why everybody ignores it is because only lasts around two three seconds and then the contingent is quiet and they just drive on down the road in reality this thing is bleeding off so much oil it's starving the rest of the engine for oil and destroying it as you drive on now what's happening here is this tensioner has a gasket around the outside okay and once it blows out like you see right here it's gonna bleed off the oil inside of this cavity so when you go to start it up cold that has to pump back up that's why you get the chain rattle noise and then becomes tight and the noise goes away the gasket leak does not go away so you're constantly losing oil out of there and you're losing even more as the oil heats up and thins out now the problem with this is that one or both of these can actually blow out like this okay and cause these pressure leaks so there's one right here on the cylinder head and then there's one over here on this engine both of them were blowing outs they're both losing oil pressure out the front of the heads here now what happens here is that that blown out tensioner causes a domino effect what happens next is it the chain starts beating on these plastic tensioners or these plastic guides okay you can see and they go down there and then that chain starts slapping around there and start shooting up the front cover and putting metal and plastic pieces down into the oil pan in worst case scenarios I see them eat up the oil pump too they'll start chewing in the front of the oil pump on there and all that's going down and plugging up your will pickup and the fine metal particles believe me are being recirculated inside the engine not everything is caught filtered by the engine oil filter okay then it's starving the cam phasers for oil so that little locking pin I showed you inside the old phaser that starts to wear have clearance issues sooner than later then you also have issues with the heads themselves not having enough oil to support the valve train okay so then the crank the hardened camshaft okay it starts eating into these aluminum cam towers right here there's no bearings for the cams on this engine so it's a soft metal against a super hard metal well when you lose oil who do you thinks gonna win the cam towers or that the cam the cams will win and the camp towers are going to lose okay and the cam towers are not serviceable so you need to get a new cylinder head at that point so this is a prime example right here what happens with this is that the wheel pump picks up oil from the pan pressurize it puts it through the filter it comes out and then it goes over to a galley and it feeds this headfirst branches off it feeds it and then it feeds the crank next goes through the crank all the way down and the rod bearings everything else to the back of the engine up and out and over to here okay and then this is the end of the line right here so you can see this cylinder head right here is the one that's gonna fail because it has the last straw I guess you could say the shortest straw when it comes to getting the oil flow from the oil pump so it bleeds off at the tensioners bleeds off down here bleeds off over here there's me very little left to actuate the cam phasor up here and oil all these valve train components so here's a real good example this cylinder head over here if I can get you nice and close these cams to camp cap has clearance issues and look at this get you down in here so you can see it you'll squish out we'll see I can pick up behind like that there's so much clearance in there because it has worn away at the aluminum caps on there because then starving for oil that's why a lot of times you'll see issues with the roller followers just like that our head I just showed you they'll be spit out and ground up back here on this heck that's always starving for oil now by comparison this cylinder head because it gets fed just about first it won't have the same issues even with the bleed out see I can't move it and they can't get that knocking noise either so as you can see that that tension are blowing out like that is not just gonna cause a start up rattle noise it's not cause internal engine damage from the front cover to the head to even the main bearings but especially this right hand head I don't know about you but I'll have thousands of dollars to put a new head on every 80,000 miles because I want to let a rattle though okay so that's what's happening inside the engine that's why it's so critical to fix a start-up rattle whenever you can so once you start hearing it starts dating for and start looking into getting the parts for doing yourself following my video series or go to a dealer dealers me about $4,000 to get a full timing job done on the engine aftermarket using aftermarket parts they're looking at around 3200 3400 at my shop the SGI motive i use all four parts the Melling high volume oil pump you can see it right 340 HP or 360 hv okay and then I'll help with the clearance issues on this head right here so we can actuate the VC T's properly that whole service out the door is $2,300 and that brings these engines back to like new condition so it's something to think about if you have this kind of issue you gotta realize what's going on inside of the engine and how its destroying it information for my company and the other videos on how to do it yourself are listed down below I'll see you next time guys

Channel: FordTechMakuloco

Views: 469,787

Keywords: FordTechMakuloco, ford, fix, problem, repair

Id: wQ8M1aw-5qw

Length: 11min 24sec (684 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 08 2018