Ford E350 | 7.3 Power Stroke - Cranks but won't Start - Part 1

I'm rearranging junk in the shop today so I ran into a part snag on the twenty nine forty John Deere I got to order some parts I don't know when they're gonna be here anyway I pulled it with a forklift all the way to the front of the shop unfortunately that means those two machines are going to be stuck here for the time being and I'll explain more about the parts situation in the follow up video on this tractor but it's gonna be a few days well next we got to get this little beauty inside [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] we can't get the lawnmower out pressures on gotta fix it before little grass grows too i alright it's yourself and your dog out of the truck you forgot the dog Thanks I have the truck puffs sorry customer howdy folks welcome back got something here that might be kind of interesting I think this is an e 450 so it's a 1995 Ford e450 and I believe they call this a cutaway van so it's a eseries cab basically and then the back part of it is chopped off and it's a cabin chassis this thing started its life as an ambulance I believe somewhere on the East Coast maybe Connecticut something like that anyway the guy who owns this truck his brother has a company where they refurbished ambulances so they took the ambulance body off put it on a new chassis and then they converted this one into a flatbed truck it's only got 50,000 miles on it or somewhere around 50,000 miles on it it's got a 7-3 Power Stroke diesel engine and it doesn't run it hasn't run he said for about two and a half years so we drug it over to my shop we're gonna see if we can get it to go I don't know if I'm gonna get the back story correct or not the guy who owns this I think it's gonna watch this video so he'll probably probably be able to correct me but as far as I understand it it had some problems running or it seemed like it was missing one whole Bank of cylinders and he had it taken to a shop the shop did something installed some parts it ran for a while and then it more or less did the same thing took it back to the shop they fixed it again then it kind of did the same thing again and then it wouldn't run at all he said all in all it's had about 50 miles put on it since that shop fixed it I don't know what they did he said they installed some parts I don't know if it was a valve cover gasket you know harness issue or an injector driver module or what we're gonna find anyway it hasn't run for two and a half years he has installed it one new battery and a crankshaft position sensor and still couldn't get the thing to run so that's basically where we're at with it so I don't know if there's anything mechanically wrong with the engine or if it's an electrical problem or what we're going to find it does crank but it will not start I got the battery charger hooked up I'll turn that up to 11 and we'll let those cook for a while and we'll see where we get with it I'm kind of glad I wasn't there when somebody puttin the 7/3 Powerstroke diesel engine in one of these eseries van chassis x' that must have been quite the hold my beer moment on the engineering floor anyway there's basically nothing you can get to by opening the hood except for the batteries and the air filter and stuff almost everything's got to be done from inside by pulling the doghouse so the first place you always want to start with one of these Huey engines is by checking the oil and you can see it's it's completely full right to the top of the full mark so no problems there but you wouldn't believe how many of these things won't start because they're out of oil of course with the Huey injection system that uses oil to fire the injectors so they don't have oil in them they will not run so when it comes to diagnosing these Powerstroke diesel engines checking the oil is about the only thing you can do without using some kind of a scan tool it's a computer-controlled engine and it takes a computer to fix a computer that's just that's just the way it is so I went ahead and pulled the codes looks like what we would expect cell system voltage low and the keepalive memory is lost so whatever codes it had stored I'm sure are long gone this p 0 1 1 3 for the intake air temperature sensor that may give us a clue so disregard the bottom to the top ones the only one that matters that must be a current code because the keepalive memory is gone so all right I'm gonna crank the engine we're gonna watch the ICP pressure that's the injection control pressure so this is the oil pressure that the engine uses to fire the fuel injectors if it does not build pressure on the ICP it will not run [Music] so you see we got good injection control pressure that is not the problem oh that was weird you got a little spike there huh but anyway I think that's fine that's not the issue so intake air temperature is currently showing minus 40 degrees let's uh let's look into that well there's your intake air temperature sensor and it's unplugged I don't think that'll keep it from running but I don't know why it would be unplugged is that it right there [Applause] it's like it's broken okay so it works it just was unplugged for some reason okay I'll let the batteries charge for a little bit let's try this again something didn't seem right about that ICP pressure didn't it seemed like it was way too high was going up to like I don't know what's going on getting a bunch of noise in the signal hang on let me move that ha that's bizarre want to piss got some kind of communication problems okay that seems better I've noticed on these older trucks the obd2 port often gets corroded and you get a bad connection with your your VCI the little transmitter for the scan tool let's try cranking that again watch the ICP pressure in the engine rpm okay so let's see can we pause that freeze there we go alright now why is it auto-ranging yeah 3300 psi on the IPA ICP sensor there's no way it should be like 400 maybe 500 so something funky is going on here I'm gonna unplug that b/c I spray some contact cleaner we're gonna try this again okay so here's another cranking event but this time I unplugged the ICP sensor so this must be a substitute of value here saying 2500 because if I plug the sensor back in it goes off the scale but it still did not start so I don't know which one of these problems we should go after first so we got what 170 rpm or so while cranking that seems reasonable IPR commanding 50% seems reasonable but then look at the ICP pressure it just feels crazy plus I'm still getting all these weird spikes all the time I don't know what's going on with that yeah we got way too high of ICP pressure I tried on plug in the ICP sensor it didn't make any difference so I don't know what we've got going on here it's like the N the IPR valve is stuck closed but then it should still run I think should still fire the injectors have got plenty of pressure so I don't know what's going on just check in the fuel pressure real quick well the fuel pumps working man it says it's got a half tank of fuel which it's a Ford so take that with a grain of salt but I'm still not getting anything out of the tailpipe good fuel pressure good crank position sensor so we're gonna try to run an injector buzz test real quick it's just gonna buzz that the solenoid on each injector and we'll see if there's any audible differences or it's not working at all wah-wah-wah p1 668 injector driver module communication fault that's not good that is not good all right guys let's review where we're at in our diagnosis here it's gotten a little bit chaotic so step number one cranking the engine we have a cranking rpm around 175 we're able to see that on this on the scan tool so I'm saying the cam sensor is okay step two we're checking the ICP the injection control pressure it spikes up to forty-five hundred psi while cranking so that tells us two things the ICP sensor is working and we possibly have a bad IPR valve know it's been sitting for a long time so there's a chance that might might self-correct but I don't know for sure step three we did the injector buzz test we were unable to communicate with the IDM we got the p1 six six eight code and we could not complete the injector buzz test so I jumped on service information real quick and it kind of printed out weird but basically that that code says that the engine started PCM detected an unexpected low or high condition on the electronic feedback circuit during a test period so it didn't start but it it was triggered by the injector buzz test that we tried to do and basically the PCM says hey I'm not seeing the feedback that I expect to see something's wrong so I think that's where we're gonna start is with the IDM the injector driver module and we'll check powers and grounds and kind of do the obvious things there first so here's the power distribution box here I pulled out the fuse that's supposed to power the injector driver module should be the same one that would normally power the fuel pump I'm hoping I have room to seven this gizmo right here which is a breakout for that relay I'm gonna put that guy in there all this a/c was gonna make it tricky and then put that guy in there no I came and see the test terminals but we should be able to test them well our fancy-pants real a breakout deal isn't gonna work because I can't even get to it cuz of freaking batteries in the way cuz this thing's a van and it's super jam-packed in here anyway there's your injector driver module back yonder here is the harness that runs to it so I just pierced into it oh we should have a ground here you guys can't see that but we do so that's good check our test light here should have power here and we do so that's good well according to the pinout this gray with a white wire here is the electronic feedback to the PCM it's currently showing so it currently shows that we have basically nothing on that one so that's where we're at I don't know it's a pretty short harness just runs up and just down here to go to the PCM I couldn't see there being a you know a chafed wire between here and there alright folks I had to step away from this thing it's actually the next day I think when we left off we were looking at the trying to do the injector buzz test to see if the injectors are good and the injector driver module was good and it kept basically failing to do the test and then giving us ap 1 6 6 8 code which is it's not liking the feedback that it's getting from the injector our module so I set up a scope Here I am tapped into where's my paperwork oh well here's the pin out for the injector driver module harness I am tapped into a belief channel one is on this brown with orange wire that's your fuel delivery command signal and channel two is hooked up to pin for this gray with a white stripe wire that is the feedback and what I'm gonna do right now is I'll just use my scan tool to command the buzz test and then we're gonna watch the scope so you see we got something happening on channel 1 but nothing on channel 2 so I don't know what the communication protocol is it's some kind of serial simple serial signal so it's trying to talk to the IDM but it's not getting anything back so yeah I don't know there's one other pin we can try to check which is this signal return grey with the red stripe wire why don't we set up and see what that does okay same test but we're tapped into the grey with a red stripe and we're not getting anything back on that one either ok I think that's it and it gave me the same code so it's kind of weird on these older power strokes you know this is like the dawn of obd2 so the the Diagnostics don't really work the way you would think they would that the injector driver module is basically its own it's kind of its own ECM but it's you know it's a module it's kind of like its own ECM but it's it's very simple there's only three I think three wires and all four wires that communicate between the the PCM and the IDM and all it does is say it commands it to deliver fuel it commands a twitch cylinder to deliver fuel to and then it monitors feedback on a couple of different different lines and the injector driver module is really just an amplifier for all intents and purposes all it does is take the signal from the PCM and and amp it up to something that can drive the injectors the injectors actually run on like a hundred and twenty volts pulsed DC so it's a you know it's a switched-mode power supply and a a transistor driver for the injectors but I need to talk to the customer I think he's already replaced the IDM once so if that's the case we don't want to just throw another IDM and it's something is killing them and we need to figure out what that is I pulled the connector and ohm doubt all the connections between the the IDM and the injectors they're all within the specs from the pinout test they're all 2.9 owns nothing is shorted to ground so I don't know what's going on here if he's got a bad harness under the valve cover or you know something is causing the IDM to fail and you know that's going to get pretty costly even the the cheap reman IDMS are 250 bucks so I need to talk to him and kind of circle back around well something I noticed just snooping around here this is the bulk connector here that connects the basically connects the chassis harness to the engine harness and anytime on these power strokes where you see a red electrical tape that's a high voltage lead so that means that's your injector harness basically solicit comes from the IDM to the engine harness and goes out to your your valve cover harnesses anyway this orange wire right here I'm not you guys can see it so this orange wire here is rubbed through that's the conductors right there and looking at the pin out the orange wire is the fuel injector feed right so that would be for the right bank of cylinders so what happens is it it the left crank and right bank each have a common power so this would power the injectors for the right bank and then each injector will have an individual wire that pulls to ground so the IDM pulls each one to ground in order to turn the injector on so let's see this blue one looks like it's rubbed a little bit too what's the blue wire light blue fuel injector number eight okay pink with yellow that's this one that's the feed for the left bank so I don't know the only one I really see that's well the blue one's got a little nick in it but this one's actually rubbed through the thing is there's nothing here so the airbox goes here and then there's a rubber kind of snorkel that goes back to the turbocharger but none of that stuff's connected to ground so even if it's rubbed through I can't see it where it would really cause it to short so I don't know I don't know what's going on anyway that's a problem I don't know if it's the problem well I say we roll the dice this is a known good injector driver module out of my own truck and they're all compatible there's no programming involved I think you can swap even the newest ones from 2003 all the way back to the earliest in 94 anyway worst case scenario we'll have two broken power strokes instead of one [Music] that's what it needs alright guys I think we're gonna cut the video here so 100% this truck means an injector driver module and I did speak to the owner he told me that he believes the injector driver module was the item that was replaced by the shop the first time he had this problem and then it ran for maybe 25 miles it did the same thing he took it back to that shop they replaced it again he ran another 25 miles and then wouldn't start at all and that was two and a half years ago so something has caused this truck to eat three injector driver modules in about 50 miles which is obviously not right so I think what I'm gonna recommend is that obviously we had to replace the injector driver module so prices are all over the map for these injector driver modules I found some used ones for 200 bucks the parts store wants 450 dollars for our Eman however there's several places online that sell them in the 200 even $175 range for a riemann including Rock Auto so probably we're gonna go that route you know it's been sitting for two and a half years so I don't imagine he's in a big hurry so we're gonna pull it outside and we'll wait until we get our hands on a good IDM and then I'm also gonna recommend that we replace the valve cover gaskets which are also the harness for the injectors and the clothes I'll show you on my truck what I'm talking about so it's a lot easier to see on the pickup than it is in that van chassis so here's the setup on my truck and this trucks actually been converted to a newer style valve cover gasket so originally it would have had two connectors one back here and one in the front that's what they use from 94 to 98 and then in 99203 they've switched to a single connector in the middle but this truck has an updated gasket that's actually made by Dorman and normally everything from Dorman with wires on it is you know an automatic fail but these are actually pretty good so what they did is they they upgraded the design so the International original International gaskets had basically an intermediate connector the valve cover gasket had a connector that connected in from the outside and one that connected in from the inside and what would happen is the inside connection would come loose and a lot of times what happened is the glow plug wires would their pins would melt and that would melt the adjacent pins for the injectors or whatever it caused all kinds of problems so the doorman setup gets rid of that they have an outside connector only and then the wiring on the inside the harness on the inside is built right into the valve cover gasket so you don't have that additional connection which is a lot better deal you see a lot of things online about the quarter trick or whatever where you can jam a quarter in there to keep the connector from from unplugging with the Dorman gasket you don't have to worry about that now the trick is or the catch I guess is that you had to replace this pigtail so you got to chop the original harness that we redid that in a recent video which I will link below and then redo all the wiring I'm at John a pickup that's no problem but on that van chassis that could be an all-day job so I still don't understand this 4,500 psi of ICP pressure while cranking I mean that's way way high you know it should be like 800 psi or something and it looked like we had a bad maybe we had a bad IPR valve our stock IPR valve but I'm actually thinking maybe that was a clue that we had a bad injector driver module I wonder if maybe the PCM needs a feedback from the injector driver module in order to actually command the IPR valve correctly so maybe it was just kind of basically closing this thing that's some kind of default strategy cuz it wasn't getting the feedback that it needed from the IDM so maybe somebody in the comments who has more experience with that could tell me if that's a normal thing with the ICP pressure should climb like that you know when cranking would be cranked long enough without the thing starting or if that's an indicator that we had a bad injector driver module I really don't know and then also if anybody has experience with these injector driver modules failing in this kind of you know pattern failure we were losing we lost three of them in 50 miles tell me what to look for because it's probably gonna sit here for a while that there's something obvious that I missed let me know alright guys thanks for watching we'll get back to the John Deere in the next video after I get some parts and I don't know if there'll be a part two on this truck or not hopefully there will be and I was wrong it actually only has 40,000 miles on it so I just can't see there being a whole lot wrong with it other than that you know injector driver issue so thanks for watching well they're not much to look at but there's three baby Robins in there moms out hunting right now I just saw her leave them alone

Channel: Watch Wes Work

Views: 99,088

Rating: 4.9539943 out of 5

Keywords: ford, e series, f series, e-450, e450, van, ambulance, diesel, engine, 7.3, power stroke, powerstroke, heui, crank no start, no start, idm, injector driver module, diagnose, troubleshoot, test, scope, mechanic, truck, fix

Id: 3uOr0IgMXm0

Length: 28min 16sec (1696 seconds)

Published: Sat May 09 2020