Just wanted to do a repost about my 2004, 6.0 saga, first i want to thank a lot of you for your patience and guidance in helping me get her running again. To recap my 6.0 story, about 3 1/2 months ago while on the highway she just died, no power at all. Prior to this she had been losing slight amounts of coolant maybe a quart a month. Not seeing any leaks i was thinking blown head gaskets, wrong. Blown egr cooler, fords answer for a steam cleaner. Anyway deleted the egr, replaced oil cooler and screen and turbo drain tube, cleaned the manifold, was at least a quarter of an inch of black sticky, soot mixed with coolant. Extending all the way into the heads, cleaned it out the best we could. Got her together, no start no start, bled fuel lines tons of air got her running for five days, then she died again on highway. Tons of black smoke pouring out pipe, no power running rough. Pulled injectors, wow!! Tips plugged solid, who would of guessed that huh!! Decided to just pull the engine, redo the heads, rebuild injectors, replace head gaskets and tty bolts, shes stock no need for arp studs in my mind. At 160000 miles the head gaskets were fine anyway, as were the heads, perfect. Cleaned the turbo,, installed new ipr, torn screen, water pump, injector ficm harness, rear main seal, front tranny seal, oil pan gasket, new 140amp alternator, new hoses all, thermostat. The grand finale was a coolant filter. She ran pretty darned good two days, then began running rough again, damn injectors, poured in hot shot to oil, she is running much better, if i had another 2k laying around i woulda just installed new ones during rebuild. Having spent countless hours and around 4 k, injectors going to have to wait for now. Moral of the story?? Get rid of that dammed federal mandated, tree hugging compliant egr, what a waste. How many resources were used up to just repair it?? How much carbon was spewed out making new parts and then processing and shipping them?? All this just to keep some dirty little tree huggin hippy happy. Suks dont it.





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Dang man... Were all of those necessary repairs, or more for peace of mind since you had it apart? Did you actually have the heads decked at a machine shop and checked for cracks/leaks? I probably would have just thrown studs in myself, but that's your call, and keeping it stock you should be ok. You said "rebuild injectors"... what actually happened here... there aren't any rebuild kits really... did you just replace o-rings etc? Hows your fuel pressure? Have you checked anything on the air side of things if you're getting all of this black smoke? Intercooler boots ok? Turbo ok? Has it been cleaned at all? EBP sensor/tube? Worth cleaning that too.

 

you will be fine with the headbolts even if you want to run some custom tunes, sounds like one h3ll of an overhaul

 

Ya was a long road home, learned a lot from it, the 6.0 is not the greatest diesel ever but she can be made into one hell of a good one with a few preventive modifications. In my book those primarily being an egr delete, coolant filter, regular oil changes at 5000 miles and fuel filters at, 10k tops. Change out your fuel regulator too, i did and am now running at 64psig, almost 20psig higher than with stock regulator. We did an awful lot of work on this engine, some of it like head gaskets and updated stand pipes etc, maybe not necessary but just prevention. This happens to be a truck that works for a living, she needs to be reliable, on the road, making money. I cant afford to have her being yard ornament., i want her to be well fed, fat and happy!!... At first i thought time to toss her aside, buy another, to tell you the truth just couldnt do that to her, shej ust needed some intensive TLC, some heart to heart talks and lots more respect. Shes sure got mine now.

After the initial egr delete and oil cooler we cleaned out the intakes the best we could, it was just full of black sticky oily stuff, i believe that my egr cooler probably had a very small pin hole leak for months as evidenced by the small coolant losses i was having. Being new to 6.0's i didnt have a clue as to just what was happening. Eventually the egr ruptured on the highway with rather catastrophic results. After doing the delete we couldnt get all that gunk out, it dried out flaked off in chunks eventually clogging 6 injectors. The only way i could see to get it all out was pulling the heads, get them ecked checked and cleaned, unbelievable how much was in there like baked on charcoal

 

How did flakes make it from the intake manifold to the fuel system? I don't follow that.

Sounds like you're headed in the right direction though man.

Might want to look into a fuel pressure gauge for the truck. Fuel pressure is the #1 injector killer on a 6.0.

Which injectors were the 6 that died?

 

My egr cooler must of had a small leak for quite a while. When i removed the manifold for the egr delete it was caked in there with black sticky stuff, soot mixed with coolant and there was quite a lot down in the throats of the heads. I washed out the intake manifold during egr delete but didnt mess with any of it down in the heads, figured it would burn off eventually. It didnt it ended up packing up in the injectors, #8 was shot so during tear down we replaced it. Numbers1, 3,4,5,6,7 were really coked up solid around the tips. We cleaned those, oddly only number 2 looked decent, weird, no rhyme or reason that i can see. Im tryin to post some pics with heads off so you can see the different burn patterns on top of the pistons. Im not sure what a normal pattern looks like though but they are different.
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After deleting the egr, installing new oil cooler etc, she had a hard time starting took an hour or more. But once she started she ran pretty darn good for about three or four days then began getting kinda doggy. At the end she began to lose all power 10 mph floored. Im sure it was from this gunk flaking off in the head and getting in the injectors. If anyone knows how to get it out of there without removing the upper head id like to know!! But thats the reason i decided to go ahead and pull the heads and get all t hat gunk out of them.
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pics dont know why but wont let me load pics!!

 

Yeah, this still doesn't make sense to me. Coolant going into the cylinders isn't going to cause injectors to go bad. My guess is something else in the fuel system is causing this, or possibly even low fuel pressure. How often do you change fuel filters? What really bothers me is how it ran fine for a few days and slowly went right back to where it was... I don't see how the gunk in the intake is what caused this. If you think that's what is/what's causing it, take the intake manifold off of the truck, and get it hot-tanked and get all that crud out of it, then take a shop vac and try and clean up whatever loose gunk you can around the intake ports on the heads. If it doesn't come off it's probably not going to when you run it again. Lets see the pics.

 

I will get several pics up asap, they are all on my xoom tablet, for some reason it wont let me upload to here. Ill find a way around it, like to hear what your thinking. Its been running pretty good for a week and a half now, especially after adding a dose of hot shot. Still not perfect though, little rough at idle, acceleration is good though. Fuel pressure is still at 64 after installing updated regulator. With the older one it was round 43/44. I installed new fuel filters just after the first time she crapped out, shes only got 1000 miles on em. I know the upper filter is clean, guess i will recheck the rail filter. Just because you got pressure does not mean you got sufficient flow! Thanks!!

 

Ford says anything under 45 psi is damaging injectors... was these fuel pressure readings or while driving? Ideally you should be looking at the lowest pressure, which would be at WOT. What kind of readings do you get at full throttle?

 

That was at wot, at idle was about 46,that was before i did any repairs, just changed filters. Borderline from what i know now. Probably do need a few new injectors, they all passed buzz test though with snap on scanner. Still she aint quite right, after using hot shot shes better. Gonna run with the hot shot, 5k till next oil change, see what happens. Can i just email ya these pics?? Cant post em here glitch in the link!!