Good Truck/Bad Truck? CAR WIZARD shares most common problems on the 5.3L Chevy truck at 100k+ miles

prices for cars and trucks are going through the roof especially for trucks and if you're looking in the market for one of these with around 100 000 miles what can you expect to have to replace with that many miles on it let's take a look [Applause] [Music] so this is a 2008 chevy 1500 with the 5.3 liter ls based motor and it has roughly 140 000 miles on it the customer stated that they want to reach 200 000 miles or more so he handed us the keys and he said check it over let me know everything that it needs do a thorough inspection so i have worked on so many of these in the years past i haven't even looked at this yet and i'm going to do wizard telepathy and i can tell you everything that's already wrong with this ls base motor okay it's got broken exhaust bolts on the manifolds possibly leaking from the oil cooler block off plate that's right above the oil filter the oil pan gasket might be leaking i think the sway bar links are probably shot on this thing probably suspension shocks or something along those lines and we're going to check the oil pressure sending unit and we'll also check the air conditioning belt the small serpentine belt just for the ac compressor which always throws the belt and you lose your ac so we'll walk around this truck take a look at it and then we'll look on the inside then we'll delve into the engine and underneath so these are offered with a 4.8 or 5.3 liter and if you got the hd version you could also get the 6 liter they're both basically the same engine with just different internals for larger or smaller displacement this one's in pretty good shape for its age i can see that it's going to need tires they're all down to the wear indicators the wear bars sadly i'm starting to see these i remember when they were new this is when this first body style came out oh seven i think or wait and these are already being seen on the road with rust and crushed and beat up and it's like wow those trucks aren't all that old but then you think about it they actually kind of are the paint is pretty decent on here luckily it's not rusted or beat up this one's a two wheel drive it is not a four by four the headlights could be refinished to get them nice and clear but that has nothing to do with whether or not it will be reliable for the next two years to come that's just for appearance only so we'll see where we go with that let's go ahead and take a look at the interior pretty basic in here mrs wizard yeah yeah it is this is definitely you know just a normal layout for a chevy it does have a good dash so there's a little bit of a crack happening up there but nothing nothing terribly bad you know one thing we just did discover as we were trying to open up the doors to here is the power locks don't work so if only one person's sitting in here that's not a problem otherwise it's a bit of a reach to get over there to get that door otherwise interior wise nice cloth seats has a really big center console which actually can be put up to offer for a total of six people in here backseat as well so this actually could be actually a family card it doesn't have any of those bells and whistles with no infotainment system but if all you're needing is a little bit of radio a little bit of tunes going as you're going down the road and obviously we've got two ports where you can charge your devices this is working just fine you can tell the person that was here before really like to control the air volume and they have rubbed off the covering on their fan again it doesn't change the functionality of it it just now has green dots the steering wheel has lots of controls and again you'd want to check those out if you were to pick up this as a used device just because cruise control has a tendency sometimes not to work again lots of controls here in the door everything is easily accessed lights controls as well so just an easy easy to use you know and maintain car you see the gauges we've got a lot happening we check our oil pressure about what is the charge in the battery and the you know temperature at the engine so you know if you're towing something with this you can definitely keep a good track of how well the systems are under the body let's pop the hood let's do it here we have the 5.3 liter which is the zero engine code it is very easy to work on these these have about 315 horsepower and 340 pound feet of torque and i'm here to tell you that that power doesn't come in until about 4 000 rpms these engines are not a low rpm tugging motor like a coming 6bt or a big block 8.1 vortec they can do the job but your rpms are going to be up there when you're towing i've worked on a lot of these and actually have owned a couple of trucks with these engines and they like i said they do the job but don't be surprised when you're towing up a hill at 3 500 4 grand or even 5 grand to get up the hill they are not low rpm monsters so will that hurt the engine being at that kind of rpm for a long time um no it won't hurt the engine but you'll sure go through a lot of fuel as you can see on these newer ones there's no fan in the way it has electric fans there's no mechanical fan in the way i should say so you can get to the belt really easy and you can reach all the way around it's very easy to work on so i did my telepathy and i predicted that it would have broken exhaust bolts let's take a look right back in there there's supposed to be a bolt head there there's also supposed to be one behind that in the next hole back nothing's there those bolts are broken and popped out let's go take a look at the other side same thing both rear bolts are broken popped out of there they're supposed to be heads where those holes are and they're gone so to fix that problem if it was just one bolt that we had to deal with we could probably chance getting it out without removing the manifolds but there are five bolts missing out of 12 total and that is going to be where we remove both exhaust manifolds completely out of the vehicle if we get lucky we can probably get some pliers and pull the remnants of the bolt out if there's enough sticking out but if not it will have to be drilled out with an easy out usually they come out pretty easy we usually don't have to do major major surgery on these that i have to drill out i charge half an hour per bolt because it literally will take that much time to drill those out if you think that's too high you drill it out i have a really cool story with drilling those bolts out years ago at a place i used to work one of the old guys his site wasn't so good anymore he could drill really well but he was drilling through the bolt and all of a sudden he saw a little bit of green liquid and he pulled the drill out and it was just a stream of antifreeze he drilled straight into the water jacket of the head that end up having to be a new head so if you're going to drill it out yourself make sure you're careful there's three ways you can destroy your cylinder head you can blow out the hole to where the threads are messed up you could drill too deep and drill into your water jacket you can also crack the head if you put a bolt in over the wrong size and try to torque it down and just crack it make sure you know what you're doing i do know what i'm doing i'll charge you a half an hour to do it when do you have to do it i mean if one's broken two four um really it comes down to if it starts making the puffing noise at idle especially when it's cold it'll be like a ch it sounds like a lifter almost like a ticking noise i've repaired probably at least 100 pairs of these manifolds a lot of them so other than that i don't see a whole lot going on up here i'll take a look real quick at the oil pressure sending unit and i can just peek back here it's kind of hard to see but it's way behind the intake you can see the wiring going to it and it's nice and dry that's a common failure point on these motors they will leak oil or your oil pressure gauge will go to zero all the time and it's usually the oil pressure sending unit they they're not very well made i don't think another thing is intake gaskets on these when it's cold in the morning it runs it misfires it runs real rough and when it warms up it runs perfect that's because the intake gaskets are basically a piece of plastic with like rubber rubber o-rings molded into it or something they have upgraded ones that fix that problem this one's luckily is not doing that there's no issues with that right now that is another thing that i've done on these engines i've done a lot of them i got so fast at it that the job would pay i think two or three hours to replace those gaskets i had done so many of them that i could remove the manifold in 15 minutes and have a setting on the ground clean everything up new gaskets and back together in another 30 minutes so 45 minutes i could have the job done and yes we would still charge the customer to three hours because it will take you probably three hours to do it it took me years to get that fast i'm not going to give myself a pay cut for being a good mechanic i'm going to charge you the same let's go ahead and get this thing lifted up and look underneath [Music] so as we're going along and checking the truck over keep in mind that you're in the market for one of these what can you expect to replace now the seller's going to say this thing's cherry it's perfect i've been maintaining it i have a stack this tall as service records i don't care you're still going to find all these things wrong with these trucks they all have those things wrong with them surface records doesn't keep the exhaust bolts from breaking they still do it so let's go ahead and start right here there is a shield plastic shield that's in the way i really like these trucks are easy to work on like i mentioned already but you can see that you can just pretty much get to everything there's tons of room i don't see any major leaks coming from up front on the front main seal these usually don't have those kinds of issues we can see this tensioner right here that i'm actually pointing to that's the ac belt tensioner and you can see the ac belt is also kind of old those are very known on these trucks to the tensioner to lock up it throws the belt there's definitely a thing you want to probably just get replaced as preventive maintenance before it happens because it will happen on these let's go ahead and check these wheels and brakes brakes look good nothing loose there no oil coming from the strut the rack boots are dry oh look at that sway bar link that shot i figured that would be right here where i'm pointing commonly leaks on these this one's not i was wrong but there's a gasket that goes here this is where an oil cooler can mount if you have a heavy duty towing package this one just is blocked off with this plate but frequently these things are pour oil all the way down here and then i get a call and say give me a quote for a rear main seal and i say well we'd like to get the truck in and take a look to see really what's going on and they're like no no no this is a rear main seal go ahead and quote it to me so i work do the time and get the estimate together and then bring the truck in and it's just a 10 gasket and they're out of there for 50 75 bucks and they're like why didn't you replace my rear main seal i have to fight and argue i have to pull this little inspection cover off look at this cover guys that's a little cover that you can take off and look inside and see if it's oily this one's not inside of there but i have to show the customer it's dry as a bone in there your rear main seal is not leaking and i show them the gasket and they're like oh i'm like yeah oh i wasted my time doing that estimate okay here's the transmission we are going to be servicing this one it's about 140 000 miles that's about the maximum i like to go before service if you've got 220 000 miles on your transmission i will not service it for you because that can run into problems cause issues the truth of the matter is you've probably got another 50 000 miles left on your transmission anyways regardless if you service it or not let's see this little vent right here that is an extension it's a kind of an upgrade for the evap vent solenoid those frequently get coked up with dirt and this moves it forward up here away from dirt and dust i'll show you that in here in a minute let's move over here to this wheel now here's the brakes nothing loose there and our sway bar link is loose everything else looks good bushings look good so we'll get sway bar links on the ticket on the estimate check this u-joint it looks good move on back here is our vent this is a little filter for the tank vent solenoid those get filled up with dirt because they used to suck in air back here but now they have an extensions kind of an upgrade that pulls air up at a cleaner area okay we'll move on back to the differential that u-joint is good nothing really leaking there these have drum brakes in the rear this shock is kind of oily coming out and it's rusted pretty bad let's check the other side you can see the filth in the mud that is built up that's from oil seepage coming out of it the shocks are dying so we'll get a quote for two new shocks in the back spare tire is good and it's nice and full and as i mentioned he's going to need four new tires we're going to quote that to him as far as he needs to take it to a tire shop we're not going to give him a quote actually we don't do tires here i've had people in the comment section say why don't you do tires it's because in order to make tires pay and profitable for a business i need to do probably 50 sets of them a day i'm not going to do that many tires and i really don't want to do that i'm not into tires i would rather make money on things like this i can make a lot more money on these repairs than i can on tires so my personal preference and my choice that we don't do tires here this has a towing package a nice receiver hitch it doesn't look like it was used very much exhaust is nice and clean all right let's go ahead and get this thing lowered down [Music] so if you were in the market for this truck you just purchased this truck you can plan on adding anywhere from 1500 to four grand to whatever you just spent on this tires are not cheap he's gonna need all four new tires those manifolds have to come off that's not done in 30 minutes that takes a several hours three or four hours to do and you got parts and bolts and everything to do then you got belts and shocks and sway bar links things add up really fast one thing we've not been able to see is how hard the transmission has been worked i don't think it was very much based on what i saw on the receiver hitch it's not towed a whole lot but you can pull the fluid dipstick the transmission dipstick it should be bright red and smell like transmission fluid if it smells like really hot breaks like burned up breaks that means the fluid has been way overheated in that something could be wrong with the transmission if not now will be soon you want to make sure you check the fluid level and also the condition of the fluid when you check it other than that a road test will tell you if there's any issues also you can take it to a mechanic and have them scan for any codes in the transmission control module that gives you an idea of what's going on one thing that i find in the shop is that people try to do their own estimates within their own mind what it's going to cost to fix their car and they never include the labor they look up an alternator that's 200 bucks so they think to change out that alternator it's going to be 200 bucks or are we working for free no we're not working for free you got half an hour an hour depending or could be two or three hours and some other cars are really difficult to get to why is it so high because you're paying me to do the job oh i i didn't even think about that wow okay so this is in really good condition for 140 000 miles in in 2008 i would totally buy this truck i have no qualms about the issues it has they're all easily fixed you can either do it yourself or pay someone to do it these trucks are very reliable they're very good i would have no issue with this truck at all prices on everything have gone through the roof there's not much we can do about that i don't know how long it's going to last hoovy has actually showed me a few instances where cars on cars and bids should be a 20 or 30 thousand dollar car all day long and they're selling for fifty and eighty thousand dollars just like whoa what's going on with people right now it's kind of crazy thinking about selling show of hands how many of you remember huvi buying a silver jaguar xj8 i think it's like a 2000 model where the wheel was about to break off and i snagged it from him that car actually belongs to junior mint now here's a picture of it and it is for sale he would like to get rid of it contact crazyd in the office call us here at omega he'll be happy to get you the information on it the asking price and get that thing moved on it is a really sweet car if you're curious what kind of tools we use to fix this truck or all the cars in the shop check my amazon affiliates link in the description below we get a small cut and we really appreciate it make sure you hit the subscribe button because we've got 308 videos coming we've got all kinds of really sweet projects going thanks for watching

Channel: Car Wizard

Views: 209,461

Rating: 4.8859472 out of 5

Keywords: car wizard, david long, hoovies garage, tyler hoover, car issues with tyler hoover, omega auto clinic, car repair, car maintenance, Hoovie, mechanic, Car issues, BendPak, Car trek, chevy, chevrolet, 1500, silverado, z70, LS, avalanche

Id: 9jvLk310tKw

Length: 20min 19sec (1219 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021