How To Diagnose And Replace A Misfiring Ignition Coil (5.4 Triton)

[Music] what's going on everyone today i'm going to be showing you how to diagnose and repair your coil on plug style coil packs now coil unplug or cop means that each individual cylinder has a coil pack that sits on top of the spark plug a lot of four cylinder engines only have one coil pack and it sits on top of the engine and it feeds all four cylinders this vehicle happens to have eight separate coil packs because it's an eight-cylinder engine this is my girlfriend's 06 f-150 xlt with the 5.4 liter triton so this is going to be our example today i will be focusing on the coil on plug style not the all-in-one coil pack like the force owners would have so let's get started uh we've got our engine light is on i don't know if you can tell you can kind of tell if you listen it's got a miss now if you don't have a scanner which it doesn't need to be you know a fancy snap-on like this you can go to o'reilly's napa autozone pep boys whatever and they'll usually let you rent a scanner to see what the code is if you do not have a scanner i'll post a picture right here showing you a cop light tester that uh what you do is you basically grab the handle and you put the end the probe you set that on top of the coil pack and it will light up and if it lights up red uh or inconsistently then you have an issue if it flashes consistently in green that means you're good i'll explain a little bit more on that later but because i do have a scanner i'm going to go ahead and show you how to do it this way first now first thing we got to do is obd2 style plug so we gotta locate the plug a lot of fords are more towards the center here this one happens to be right here it only plugs in one way come on focus jesus all right so now we're gonna shut the vehicle off we're gonna turn the key to the on position or run but we're not gonna start it gonna turn the scanner on ford obviously if you don't have a ford you won't be doing this you'll be picking a different vehicle verify all the information is correct all right now we're gonna go to code scan now we're gonna go down to engine memory codes and we have this one's probably just a generic one i'm not going to be too worried about that one because that's not going to cause misfire we've got this p0351 ignition coil a primary secondary circuit fault now because ford wants to be difficult a means cylinder one so instead of using cylinder one two three four five six seven eight four uses cylinder a b c d e f g and h so a means one all right now on the forwards cylinder one is the passenger one all the way towards the front of the truck so i already know this one is bad i've gone ahead i've already swapped out coils which i'm going to show you how to do next so we've verified which one is the problem now sometimes you'll get a multiple cylinder misfire code and hopefully at that point it logs multiple codes okay so now with this one if you're not sure what that means you could go on google and type in your year make and model and then the p0351 or whatever code yours is and it'll give you a description and possible causes on how to fix it so let's pop the hood take a peek at this jalopy okay now the first thing you want to do is like i said identify which cylinder it is so if you have to you can google the uh cylinder layout or the firing order of your particular vehicle like i said this particular engine um cylinder one is the passenger side front so i'm coming over here here's the number one coil it's kind of hidden you can see that it is plugged in here's the electrical connector right here it is plugged in so that's what you want to make sure you can unplug them and then plug it back in make sure you can feel it click or engage that you got good connection it's also not a bad idea to check the pins and make sure that they're not burnt or melted or you know spread out too far not making good contact now like i was saying with that cop or coil on plug tester you just you would help i'll put a link in the description if you want to buy this by the way um you just hold it and you put the end the little probe over the top of the coil pack here and it'll just kind of blink letting you know if it's firing or not now that's not the best method because that just tells you that either your coil pack or your spark plug are bad it won't tell you which one it is now i recently just did all eight spark plugs on this thing so i'm pretty confident that this is not the issue i'm pretty positive it's going to be an actual coil that's bad so if you've verified that it's plugged in everything looks good what you can do is you can actually swap with another cylinder so you can unbolt in this case on this exact engine this little seven millimeter bolt right here holds the coil pack in so what i did to diagnose this is i unbolted this coil pack and i switched it with that one and now if this coil is bad then your code should move to this cylinder you'll no longer have a cylinder one misfire or whatever cylinder you had in my case it was a cylinder one well when i moved it to this one it switched from a cylinder one misfire to this cylinder which means it's not the spark plug it is the coil now sometimes these misfire codes can be tricky because you'll notice the engine will start running rough and having a lack in performance but it might not trip an engine light right away this is because sometimes it's required to have x amount of misfires before the engine throws a code so what i'm going to go to is my functionality test since i do have the scanner here for my cylinder contribution test now a negative number means the cylinder is not helping so if you go at the bottom here we start at cylinder eight this is a negative number but it's not very negative so we might have a little something going on with number eight i'm not too concerned with that right now the big one is here at number one negative 33 so it's not that that cylinder is not firing it's not doing anything so as you can see the only downfall to is the method of switching coils with another cylinder is after you switch the coils you may have to drive the vehicle for a day you know or x amount of miles before it throws an engine light again so that you can check and see if in fact the misfire moved with the coil or if it stayed with the original cylinder um i will put a link in the description for my other video showing i know on a lot of chrysler vehicles you can cycle the key on and off three times and it will show in the odometer area what your code is so you don't need a scanner it'll just cycle through all the codes so we'll put that in the description that does not work on this particular ford vehicle so now that we know number one is for sure not firing we are now going to go ahead and replace it all right here's the new coil with the oem motorcraft part number if you have this exact engine and you wish to purchase this i'll put a link in the description all right so i actually did a little bit of digging beforehand and i ordered two coils and i'll show you why in a little bit here but we're gonna start first by removing that seven millimeter bolt down there again if you have a different vehicle it might be a different size but the steps should be pretty similar so we're gonna grab a seven mil right now all right so we're gonna unplug the coil get our ratchet down on there gonna be kind of careful with these because they're not exactly the beefiest bolts in the world sometimes it helps to have a little pocket magnet to get them out of there too i unfortunately forgot mine so i'm just gonna have to grab it and as you can see when i did the spark plugs i took the liberty of putting some anti-seize on here so that they don't uh become seized in there and snap off because it's kind of a notorious problem on these trucks all right now some coil packs are just like spark plug boots where you'll they snap into place you push down and they snap into place these particular forward ones do not snap into place they just rest on top of the coil or sorry on top of the spark plug so we're gonna fish that out there we go there's a little spring in there that contacts with the top of the spark plug and i'm also going to remove this other one back here and i'll show you why in a second now i believe by ford standards this is still under three because they go one two three four and then five six seven eight um i'll show you why i'm removing this one and replacing it as well so when i did the spark plugs i just happen to notice that there's a little crack right there right push on it it moves quite a bit and you know that's where your pins go through your wiring runs right there and i don't like that so to prevent further issues we're gonna be replacing the number three and the number one today now i'm gonna keep this one for a spare coil maybe keep it you know in the truck or something in case we're stranded somewhere with the truck running like crap i don't know but um i don't like that so we're gonna go ahead and install our two new coil packs now i'm not sure if this is an update but one thing to note as you can see the spring actually hangs out more on the new coil so maybe they had issues and this is an update another thing you want to do before you put your new parts in is you want to match them up and make sure that they look relatively similar like obviously there's this minor change but everything else is the same so i'm gonna guess that this is you know an update uh especially being that i ordered these parts from a ford dealer off of the vent so i'm gonna guess that these are in fact the right coils i'm not sure if they have the same number yep same same top number so we're good go ahead and put them in now you want to make sure you're putting these in the right way as well as you can see oh my fingers in the way right here there's the threaded hole for uh the bolt that holds the coil down and then next to it is the hole that the coil actually goes into so that means you have to install it this direction not this direction otherwise you're not going to be able to bolt it down wrap that one into place again on this exact engine there's no clicking some other engines you know you'll have to kind of determine when you pull it apart if you if you feel it click and thunk when you pull it apart you should probably feel a click when you're going back together these ones no clip i'm going to start the mounting bolt down by hand because there are sort of wimpy bolts and i don't want them to cross thread or snap or anything like that so i'm just going to start it with the socket by hand and then we'll migrate to the ratchet now i'm using a quarter inch ratchet that's plenty of power you don't want to snap these just to give you a size comparison there's my finger they're pretty small so it won't take much we're just going to give them you know it's still not quite bottomed out yet like right there i can feel it bottom out so we're just going to give it a little snug and that's it now we're going to move to the next one same thing as the other one snake it down into the bore you may have to move some stuff out of the way this one i think i can sneak it in there there we line up the mounting bolt there and get our bolts started all right they're both in they're tight now don't forget to plug them in do not forget to plug them in but also remember not to be too aggressive when we plug them in because i'm listening for the click here it's really quiet on this one it's not a very solid click but i felt it you might not be able to hear it but we don't want to push too hard on it when we're plugging them in because we don't want it to crack like that other coil did all right both plugged in now we're going to fire it up see how it runs [Music] now i can tell you in person already by feeling it it runs much better however we do still have an engine light that's because most cars won't clear the light on their own um some of them will after a certain amount of drive cycles or key cycles but most of them you will have to reset with the scanner so now we're gonna fire this thing back up oops clear codes and they want the engine off i believe engine off key on all right now i'm going to start it again no engine light so that's that um you know you will like i said you will need a scanner to clear it out but if you don't own one you can go to an auto store and they will rent you one so you can go out to the parking lot clear it out basically you can do all this without any tools you just rent the scanner at the auto parts store see which code you're getting for which cylinder if you have to do a little swaparoo with the coil packs to you know verify whether it's the spark plug or the coil pack replace the faulty component go back rent the scanner again clear it out and you're fixed hope this video helped you out if it did make sure you hit that like button and don't forget to smash that 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Channel: Tony The Truck Guy

Views: 456,454

Keywords: coil pack replacement, how to replace a coil pack, ford f150 coil pack, how to replace ford f150 coil pack, ford f150 ignition coil, how to test a bad coil, how to replace an ignition coil, ford f150 misfire, how to fix a misfire, how to diagnose a misfire, ford f150 skipping, ford f150 shuttering, ford f150 sputtering, ford f150 transmission issue, testing bad coil pack, replacing coil pack, How To Diagnose And Replace A Misfiring Ignition Coil (5.4 Triton)

Id: 4p1Qf_s7UQE

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 22 2017