Mechanic: Getting the Right (vehicle) Information · 2:25am Feb 27th, 2019

Alright, fillies and gentlecolts, this one’s gonna be shorter than most. You don’t need to get your favorite adult beverage . . . but you can if you want to. I know I am.

From an episode, apparently

We’re going to talk about an Escape and an Econoline, and we’re going to talk about having the right information.

First up is an Escape. It’s been a few years since this thing rolled into our shop, so I can’t remember all the details exactly.

We’ll start by setting the scene. This couple has two Escapes--a blue one and a maroon one. The husband drives one of them, and the wife the other.

They’re similarly equipped, I think both V6, and I can’t remember if they were four wheel drive, two wheel drive, or one was one and the other was the other.

We’d been servicing their vehicles for years.

One day, they decided that they were going to sell the maroon one and get a newer vehicle. There was nothing significantly wrong with it.

I can’t remember what they bought to replace it, but the wife didn’t like it. Every time she came in for service with her new vehicle, she said how much she missed her Escape.

I can understand that. My old S-10 (technically, it was a GMC s-15/Sonoma) was a comfortable fit for me, and I’d probably still be driving it except that I completely wore it out. If the right deal came along for a similar S-10, I’d probably buy it.

We also have another customer who had an Escort ZR2 that he kept until the rust situation became critical, and then they had no choice but to let it go.

Since he loved it so much, his wife managed to find another one on Ebay and bought it for him, and he drove that for a few years (at least three) before it, too, succumbed to the slow creep of rust.

Yes, this is a Grand Am, but it’s got a Michigan plate . . .

Anyway, back to our couple with the Escapes. One day, she called to make an appointment for an oil change. And she had her old Escape back! She’d tracked it down at a dealership, and bought it back.

I was kind of surprised by that, but hey, it could happen.

We already had all the info for it in the computer, and so with a long lapse in service records and a bunch more miles, things were back to the way they’d been before.

It was months or more that we finally ran headlong into the problem. It needed brakes, which was no big deal. I got on the computer and ordered them and by the time they arrived, I was ready to slap on the new brakes. But there was a problem. The rotors fit just fine, but the pads were wrong. They wouldn’t fit in the bracket at all.

This is not unknown; sometimes vehicles have more than one option, and either I ordered the wrong brakes for it, or else the listing was wrong.

In fact, that was a known problem with Escapes of a certain vintage. In theory, they had one set of front brakes for those with drum brakes in the rear, and a different set of front brakes for those with disc brakes in the rear. That’s how they were listed in the catalog.

That’s not how Ford actually built them. Whether it was a parts shortage of one type of brake, or Ford not telling the aftermarket what they’d actually done, I don’t know. If it had been just one vehicle, I’d have assumed at some point in its life, someone had put a complete set of the wrong brakes on it . . . but I’d seen many of them like this.

No big deal; I logged into the catalog and tried again. Changed around vehicle options, and lo and behold, I could pick a different set of pads.

Which were also wrong. I didn’t even need to order them to know that.

So I got on the phone with Car Quest. Why did their catalog not show pads for this Escape, a reasonably common vehicle?

The lady at the parts store had no idea.

Sometimes they have a different catalog arrangement at the parts store than we do, but when she looked it up, she got the same results than I did. Even widening the field, leaving all the various options as “don’t know” (yes, that’s legit a dropdown choice in some catalogs), pads for this vehicle simply did not exist in the aftermarket.

In fact, that wasn’t the only odd thing. The trimline on this particular Escape also didn’t register in the catalog. I can’t remember what it was specifically, but let’s say that the options are XT and XLT, and the one I was working on said Lariat.

I was getting frustrated. The parts lady was getting frustrated. It’s a common vehicle with a common part, and she kept asking me to confirm stuff that I’d already told her. We’d seen this Escape dozens upon dozens of times, and never really run into a problem.

Except we hadn’t.

This was NOT her old Escape. This was the same color, yes, but it was two model years different.

And we’d never checked.

We’d taken her at her word that it was the same one, unlikely as that was.

The salesman at the dealership where she bought it might have told her it was the same Escape as the one she’d sold, I don’t know. Or she might have heard what she wanted to hear. But it was not.

Unsurprisingly, when I gave the parts lady the correct model year, she could get the brake pads that actually fit the vehicle.

There’s a certain level of trust you have with your customers, especially regular customers. So even if her story sounded a bit weird, it might have been true. But we didn’t have to take it at face value; the VIN on the car generally doesn’t lie, and at any time since she’d brought that Escape back in, we could have seen if the VIN matched what we had in our system . . . which, obviously, it didn’t.

In case you’re wondering, we didn’t tell her. If she really believed that this was her beloved Escape back again, we weren’t going to be the ones to tell her that it wasn’t. We just made a private note in our records and left it at that.

And now to the Econoline.

That came in a few weeks ago for a check engine light, and the Overdrive Off light flashing.

My manager, who’s not really a Ford guy, didn’t know what that meant--on Ford trucks of that vintage, the OD Off light flashing indicates that the transmission has set a code.

So I pull the codes, and there’s two. P0750, and P0753. Both of them indicate a fault in Shift Solonoid A.

I look into the diagnostics, and strangely enough, there isn’t a lot on Identifix for those two codes, and none of it for Econolines. But there’s an article for Explorers--which use the same transmission--that gives me some clues, and I decide that it is not operating reliably.

One thing that worries me a bit is that all the repairs in Identifix have been to replace the PCM (who controls that solenoid). Sometimes you’ll get that, though, a sort of false indication, because all the ones were it was just the solenoid, nobody needed to look in Identifix to figure out what was wrong.

He wants to know what we have to do to repair it, and here my experience with Fords comes in. I assure him that they’re on the bottom of the valve body, and it’s as easy as dropping the pan, taking out a couple of bolts, and boom. Done. I’ve helped put one in on an Expedition before.

It’s a common enough part that it’s available aftermarket locally, so we get one, and I pull it up on the rack and drop the pan. There’s a hard plastic wire pathway thing that I’d forgotten about, but that was no big deal. Pull it back out of the way, the solenoid pack slides right out, slap the new one in, and since we’ve got the pan dropped, it would be dumb to not put a new filter in.

Problem is, he ordered the wrong filter. The pickup tube is too short.

So he orders a different one, puts it in, and away we go. Take it for a test drive, it seems okay, and the customer takes it.

Another successful fix!

Also apparently from the show . . . really need to catch up on episodes

A week later it was back. Same problem.

I test drive it, and sure enough, it reoccurs. So back up into the air we go, and I notice that the plug into the transmission isn’t fully seated. When I get it out, it’s full of transmission fluid, so I do check at the PCM--Identifix said it was the top connector, and that one’s easy to get to--to make sure that there isn’t any transmission fluid in there.

A lot of people don’t know this, but wires with weatherpack connectors (to keep water out) make fine pipes, and fluids can be pushed quite a ways, possibly causing all sorts of havoc. I’ve heard of Fords that got brake fluid all the way back to the PCM from a bad brake pressure switch, and more commonly for it to leak out in a distant connector and short things out there.

I’ve also seen a Jeep that poured transmission fluid out of the PCM when I unplugged the connector.

So I plug the thing back in, fully this time, and wonder if that was the problem.

When I take it for a test drive, it’s clear that was not. It occasionally struggles to shift, and interestingly, the first two times it only malfunctions in front of a particular sod farm, before going to malfunctioning every time.

[I had the scanner with me and was recording data, clearing codes, etc., and discovered that one time it had only gone one minute and twenty six seconds before the code reset.]

I got back to the shop, told the manager the news, and we didn’t have time to look at it any more right then, so it got forgotten in our parking lot.

Last Friday, he apparently had his son drive it prior to returning it to the customer, and then rather angrily told me that the same problem had happened again. I reminded him that I knew; I’d told him several days prior that it wasn’t fixed.

While it would be nice if cars fixed themselves from sitting in our parking lot, that didn’t happen.

So today I dug back into it.

I got that Identifix article and printed out some connector end views and rather quickly ran into issues. The connector wasn’t the one they said it was. The circuit numbers weren’t the same.

And oddly, when I tried to option out the vehicle in a different service manual, it just wouldn’t come up. It was an 06 E-250 passenger van with a 4.6L . . . and yet, as far as Mitchell was concerned, no such vehicle existed. All the E-250s were cargo vans.

Now, one thing to know about full-sized vans is that many conversion vans start as cargo vans--they’re cheaper, since they don’t have stuff in them that the conversion company is going to remove anyway.

But this wasn’t a conversion. It was a regular passenger van, built start to finish by Ford.

As I was poking around under the hood trying to figure out why the connector for the transmission was pinned differently than the diagram said it was, I happened to notice the vehicle emissions label.

Source (not the actual label)

And the first thing that caught my eye was 2005 Model Year.

Back up to the computer I went. There was a full VIN in there, and it wasn’t the same as the VIN on this particular van.

So I typed the correct VIN into Identifix. This time, Club Wagon was an option. And when I put the codes I had in (P0750, P0753), the most common repair was wire rubbed through on EGR tube.

I yanked off the doghouse, pulled the air inlet tubes off, and by golly, the same thing had happened on this van. Verified with an ohmmeter than one of the partially melted wires was the control wire to Shift Solenoid A--it was--and fixed it.

Problem solved. Doing the diagnosis for the van that was actually in front of me, instead of the van that the computer said it was, was the solution.

But how did that happen?

How did the VIN for an entirely different van get entered into our computer?

I’d inspected it the very first time it came into the shop, and I’d written down the VIN and the license plate number, probably. My manager might have entered it in himself, but that’s not really his style. Unless I find the original inspection sheet, I’ll probably never know for sure.

[In case I forgot to mention it above, when it came in a couple weeks ago, that was the first time we’d ever seen it, so there was no mistaken assumption that it was another, different van.

There are three ways to enter a vehicle into our shop management program. The first is a series of dropdown menus. You pick the year, the make, the model, the engine, etc.

You can also enter the full VIN, and the computer will decode it for you.

This is a step that’s hard to screw up. VINs have an algorithm with a check digit, along with certain digits that have to be certain things--model year, country of manufacture, company, division, engine, etc. If you told me you had an 88 Suburban and that the first digit of the VIN was Y, I’d know you were lying.

Odds are high that any given typo wouldn’t pass both the logic bar and the algorithm bar. I suppose it could happen, but it’s unlikely.

And this VIN wasn’t close to being correct.

There’s a third way you can look up the vehicle info using Mitchell. You can type in the licence plate number, and it’ll come back with what that vehicle is supposed to be.

This isn’t always as accurate; there are times that information isn’t updated, so it’ll either say no match, or if the plate has been transferred, it’ll show whatever it used to be on.

Here’s the amazing part. The van I was working on was a 2005 E-150 with a 5.4L engine.

What happened is that my manager mistyped the licence plate number. He claims it was because of my bad handwriting--and my handwriting is bad, but it’s not bad enough that you’d mistake a nine for an eight. A y, maybe, but not an eight.

And by pure coincidence, the mistyped plate number came back as a 2006 E-250 with a 4.6L.

Source

Report Admiral Biscuit · 893 views · #mechanicing #Escape #Econline #Jargon #Coincidence #my nines might look like ys but they don't look like eights #more spiders

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Mechanic: Getting the Right (vehicle) Information · 2:25am Feb 27th, 2019

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