Mechanic: Zephyr · 2:39am Jul 2nd, 2019

We’re gonna talk about aspirations of greatness

From the show, I imagine

No, not that Zephyr.

This is in some ways a sequel, but it’s not. Not in the sense that the Cruze was, anyway. It’s also a short one, ‘cause there aren’t all that many lesson to be learned from this one--it’s a ‘been there, done that’ sort of thing.

But I got more pictures, so yay!

The vehicle in question was a Lincoln Zephyr, which is a Ford Fusion with aspirations. The symptom was a misfire on number four.

It also had three coil circuit codes stored, a P0316 which is unique to Ford as far as I know, and means that the misfire started happening in the first 1000 engine revolutions, and an ignition timing code.

If I’d been smart, I’d’ve written all the codes down, but that doesn’t matter. Since I’ve been here before (remember the MK-Z), the first thing to do was look at coils.

On Ford’s FWD 3.0, there are three coils you can easily access and three of them that you’ve got to pull the intake to get to.

It’s worth note that the open hole in the front is where coil number four should be.

Luckily, number 4 is in the front, and easy to get at. And I could have pulled it; that’s a legit diagnostic method. In fact, most likely I was going to wind up pulling it sooner or later, so might as well be sooner, right?

Well, one of the tools I’ve got is a FLIR TG165. It’s about the cheapest handheld camera you can buy on Amazon, and the resolution isn’t great, but it’s okay. Early 2000s ~~potato~~ cell phone camera quality, I’d say.

And as one of our trainers always said, we should get out our tools and play with them. Sure, on this car if it was what I thought it was, a visual or olfactory examination would reveal the failed part, but what about a vehicle where the coils were less accessible? What do I have to lose by trying a new tool?

So I did.

(For some reason, FimFic rotated the next three pics, and I don’t know how to fix it, since they’re unrotated in the original images. Just deal with it, I guess.)

One thing that’s worth knowing on cars: sometimes it’s hard to get specs for things. However, for many things on cars, there’s more than one. We use that for diagnosis--if you suspect a coil or a spark plug as a potential cause for a misfire, why not move things around and see if the misfire moves? I could swap the plug with cyl 5, and the coil to cyl 6. If the misfire moves to 5, I know it’s the plug; if the misfire moves to 6, I know it’s the coil, and if the misfire doesn’t move, that’s a result, too. I can ignore secondary ignition and concentrate on other possible failures.

Don’t know what the resistance of a wheel speed sensor is supposed to be? Test one that still works, and see if the one you think is bad is the same.

Or, even for repairs--I always do drum brakes one side at a time, so I can look at the side I haven’t taken apart yet to see where all the springs are supposed to go.

Looking back at that image, you can see which one of these is not like the other ones. No surprise, it’s number four.

Just for giggles, I took a picture of it with the infrared camera when it was out of the car.

And this is what it looks like with a normal camera.

I can’t give you smell-o-vision (TM), but trust me, y’all would know from a sniff test that that coil had gone bad. And there was a little puddle of electronics juice at the bottom of the spark plug hole.

Now, those of you with good memories or those of you who went back and read my blog post about the MK-Z are probably already thinking that when an ignition coil on a Ford 3.0 goes all melty, that’s not good for the pixies in the PCM, and you wouldn’t be wrong about that.

I would like to say that testing with a noid light revealed that the driver was shorted, however, I had too much faith in my infrared camera and thought that I could watch from the top of the coil and see if it got hot before the new one overheated. I was wrong about that--the replacement coil also melted. Oops.

So, the customer had little choice but to buy a new PCM and a new coil and a tune-up as well (no sense in only replacing one spark plug, after all).

And once I had the new PCM in and was waiting for the Ford tool to do its ten minute wait to get into the security system [I told the manager that I required two keys to program, and he got them from the customer]. I pried open the PCM case to see the carnage inside.

Sadly, this one wasn’t as fried as the last one, which is a shame. You can see some discoloration on what I presume is the driver, and some bubbling in the conformal coating, but that’s it.

I’m going to end this with an amusing little tale. Y’all might remember me blogging about the sad Cruze, and in a later blog I mentioned that we’d gotten another in with the same issue and the same codes, and I looked back at my old blog posts for the code list? Well, my manager thought this might be the same car we’d previously put a PCM and coil in--they were both black, and they were both Lincolns, and both from not-regular customers. So I pulled up the old blog post and found out that the last one was a MK-Z.

He wanted to know more about my blog.

I said it was not for him.

Later on, when I went up front, he was trying to find it on his phone. Of course, he was searching with my real name, and presumably not having any luck finding it.

The funny thing about that is that he knows about the Admiral Biscuit shirts, and if he had thought to use Admiral Biscuit as a keyword, he might have had better luck.

And maybe he did, and maybe he discovered #mymanagerisanidiot on several of the stories and got so offended that he never mentioned it again.

Or maybe he got offended by pictures of ponies.

Who knows.

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