Why Did This Ford F-150 3.5L EcoBoost Engine FAIL?

hey guys what's up welcome back to the fourte Makey Loco channel uh so today we're just kind of overrun with EcoBoost engines in here we have a 2017 F-150 with a 35 second gen EcoBoost that needs a timing job it's rattling like crazy on Startup uh and this one right here is a first gen ecobo boost 2014 F-150 um um he knows he needs a timing job but it's making one heck of a racket under the hood which is not normal for this engine unless they've actually let go um usually they need timing sets and otherwise they just sit there and a hum and they're nice and quiet and they're sound pretty good actually um so this is not a normal timing noise I'll bring you over the vehicle in a second but um the Power Balance on there across all the cylinders is okay um the relative compress with the scan tool everything's great the guy says has plenty of power boost uh no misfires all that good stuff but the thing is loudest can be under the hood and it sounds like a valve train tick uh from cylinder 1 I'll let you hear in a second here um the problem is there's no lifters or followers to fail on here it's a mechanical bucket system on the first gen EcoBoost engines so that's me interesting so what we'll do is I'll go over and I'll let you let you listen to it it's pretty evid ID and um then we're going to pull the valve cover and we'll come back and we'll show you what we actually find I'll be interested to see what we find because I've never seen a valve train failure on one of these and the guy takes care of his oil like crazy so I don't know let's go check it out all right so like I said I mean this guy takes care of his truck and his engine and everything look all the stuff he has on here and everything else and he maintains the wheel like crazy Power Balance we had it running we load tested everything nothing the guy says nothing and then uh relative compression great across the board but listen to this listen to how this [Applause] sounds real loud on cylinder one right here I use this stethoscope and I could definitely pinpoint cylinder one this side sounds perfectly normal this side's definitely not though right here I'm back I think I'm just hearing you know resonating noises back but it's definitely hitting hard on these valve car bolts right here uh the ones up here by the front cover they're kind of quiet so it's right here here so we'll see not going to look pretty inside of there I'm sure okay so as you can tell by the engine being on the stand things escalated quite rapidly after the initial part of this video so yes we went in in there and we actually ended up replacing this engine and I just want to show you why so as I left last left you you heard the sound heard this loud tapping especially right here in the valkar bolts right in this area number one and uh want to pull the valve cover to investigate further like I said has mechanical bucket system on it so it's very reliable it's not much to break so if you zoom in on here you can actually see the buckets you could see them right there so right here's mechanical bucket so basically it's a bucket on top of a the valve spring and it has the the cement different thicknesses uh to get the required clearance between the cam shaft and the ET so it constantly has tension on it based on the clearance on there so there's not much to fail so unless the Val spring broke and it's a bunch of slack in there now it's going to keep tension and we're not going to have any wear issues or noise issues and sure enough like I said they're reliable look at that guy takes care of his oil there's no wear in the cam lobes even the nose on here here's another one there's two exhaust and two intakes for each cylinder and we were hearing all that noise right around here these two valve col bolts so we're kind of localizing right in here in cylinder one and if you look down into the cylinder I mean it looks pretty good down in there I mean right here there's some valve relief built in here and here and here uh that's not contact uh the valve relief uh built into the Piston um I don't see anything really with the Piston maybe a little bit of scuffing over over here on the cylinder wall it's not normal uh besides that looks pretty good like I said there was not a compression loss and there was not a mechanical mechanically induced misfire either ran great no misfires great fuel economy um so sure enough pulled the valve cover didn't find anything at that point we went ahead and we pulled the oil filter off of there it's been on there maybe a thousand miles or so maybe less um so that filter had you open it up you cut it open and there was a lot of fine metal there nothing big nothing chunk no chunks nothing like that but there's fine metal not normal I think I have a clip of that where I'm kind of swirling it around so at that point we knew that much noise going on on top of the engine wasn't timing related obviously confirmed what I already knew it was not valve train related we need to go go down below so we sold my engine and afterwards put on a stand here to check it out sure not fles check it out so you look down inside here we just dropped the pan we did not do anything uh with it besides just drop it we dropped it nice and carefully so we haven't touched any of these pieces so down in the actual pan here if I can get a light down in here and SWR it around I mean there's not much to it looks pretty clean but over here towards cylinder one on this side we have all these metal pieces if you look at them get a focus there we go if you look at them you can see it's a cylinder it's a a piston skirt so right here is that anti- friction coating right here that goes in the side of it where it loads up and that's part of it so that's the piston on there with they call a skirt so that's the bottom part of it so at least one side was broken for whatever reason that's why we're seeing a little bit of cylinder wall scuffing in there like I pointed in the video there and then the these chunks these chunks are coming down from cylinder one right in this area so the rest of this you know it kind of looks okay see if I swirl it if if it'll get that yeah there we go see you'll be able to tell if I swirl it around swirl it around pick it up in the bottom here you can kind of get a swirl to it of the real fine metal let's see if I can do it again it's hard to see but um what we did is we poured we drained all the engine oil out into a paper towel and then we kind of swirled it around in there as it was filtering through it to look for any big chunks or anything like that and there was a nice swirl of real fine aluminum um which you can kind of see in here it's hard to capture in video but you can kind of see it but yeah I made the right call for sure considering there's piston pieces sitting here um looks like it's all from the wall from the skirt on there there's a ring looks like a very small one so that'd be one piece of the oil control ring which again is the very bottom all right now with the engine flipped over cylinders one two and three are on this side now so I went ahead and pulled off the main stiffening girdle right there and the oil pickup just so we can have some more room access down in there check it out see see there's some pieces of the skirt right there and well pickup screen no big deal we know his engine's toast now I was concentrating on cylinder one here boroscope checking everything out couldn't really find anything the reason being for that is it's cylinder 2 that actually let loose on there so I was hearing in the Val car bolts right around here here and here and that makes sense was right there in between the two of them so what we'll do is we go to cylinder 3 here real quick where the lights die and we'll show you what a good piston looks like for reference from the bottom side okay let me get you in here maybe pull you back a little bit and focus so right here you can see in the middle is the connecting rod and cylinder walls right there nice good cross-hatch pattern and then that is the underside of the Piston so you see right there where it says fomo Co on it that is the sides the two sides of the Piston that get loaded up as it goes goes around and around right so that that's called a piston skirt and that keeps the piston in check from slapping the cylinder walls as it goes round and around and around so it's kind of important well let's take a look at cylinder 2 totally gone why I do not know the guy says he just changes oil and down the road it went and all a sudden it let loose that whole side of the Piston skirt is totally gone all the way down to the oil control ring on there so that whole chunk is gone fell down the pan and that's why he had no issues with misfires or um any kind of compression loss or compression based base engine misfires is because it wasn't a full destruction it was it just the the Piston let loose on there putting it down into the pan so that's why it was getting that slapping noise as it was going around and around that that sharp wrapping noise is because this whole side was gone and it wasn't keeping the piston in check as it went around and around and around on there so this one is all the way down to the oil control ring which from the bottom side is the very first ring uh it has two squeegee wipers on it and then that little squiggly part there in the center and they were together to control the amount of oil that actually gets put into the cylinders so as it goes up and it hits the the the power stroke and it's coming down and it fires it's squeegeeing off that that that um cylinder wall all the way down and repeat rinse and repeat right so I want to show you real quick we'll bring it up is I want to show you we're going to bring that guy up go ahead I want to show you what it does so we're going to bring it up to the top here and it's it's hard to see this stuff no matter what I'm sorry for all the focusing issues but that's how it is when it's so tight in here so go ahead and bring it up a little more I want the skirt on this side to come all the way up keep going keep going a little bit bottom dead center right there all right hold the light over here right there and that one can just go wherever okay so let me get down here and focused I'll show you exactly what it's was doing okay okay so that right there is the other side of that piece right there sticking up is the other side of the Piston skirt and you can see how it's pretty far away from the cylinder wall yeah you see how it goes back cuz now it's able to rock in there back and forth just like that because there's nothing to keep it in check so as it goes round and around and around with no piston skirt really there it's just going to slap against the wall each time and that's where he's getting all that noise so that explains that and explains the noise a good uh a good version I guess you could say uh a good good sound clip of the way you know it's going to sound when the actual skirt is missing on there why it happened I still don't know um but it did and I don't know the guy's being totally truthful with me he just changed his oil and it just happened um or just one of those freak incidents where you know the casting had a small crack in it in one day just slapped too hard and the casting just blew apart on there and dropped down in there so but I figur we tear it apart we tear it down a little bit and see exactly what happened with it

Channel: FordTechMakuloco

Views: 56,910

Keywords: FordTechMakuloco, ford, fix, problem, repair

Id: -tdjdqOLVmQ

Length: 14min 13sec (853 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024