Catastrophic engine failure, what would you do?

If it’s a con rod bearing, that’s assembly or a defective bearing. I’ve spun 2, one in my bored/stroked ZX11 drag bike, the other in a <gasp> v8.

If all OP says is true, actually, even if it’s just close to true, I’d agree to pay for the teardown but I’d want someone taking a look at the cause. I’d like to know how an ecu tune fried a connecting rod bearing. If it could be reasonably articulated that a tune I had actually caused the failure, ok, fair point. But, having a tune doesn’t grant carte blanch for a dealer to assert or a manufacturer to enforce a blanket warranty denial on unaffected parts. burnt valve, hole in the piston from detonation, rod through the block etc because of the tune - yep, I get that. Unfortunately, I’ve been down this path before. It was 6 weeks to resolve, and I eventually prevailed but I got hooked for the tear down money. In my case corporate heads prevailed before court. My mods were just bolt on stuff - ignition, pulleys, MAS, filter & intake, but of course they made an issue of it. None if had anything to do with the failed timing chain tensioner ( on a v8 also ).

This dealer’s not doing you any favors here, frankly, they’re not being an honest broker either. I would push them for a cause of the failure, and make it clear if it’s not something supported by evidence the tune caused the problem, Ford will need to honor its warranty.

You could just buy my 2013 Roush Raptor with 35k miles, deaver’s and fox3.0, add and Baja designs etc.... [emoji12]


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smurfslayer said:

If it’s a con rod bearing, that’s assembly or a defective bearing. I’ve spun 2, one in my bored/stroked ZX11 drag bike, the other in a <gasp> v8.

If all OP says is true, actually, even if it’s just close to true, I’d agree to pay for the teardown but I’d want someone taking a look at the cause. I’d like to know how an ecu tune fried a connecting rod bearing. If it could be reasonably articulated that a tune I had actually caused the failure, ok, fair point. But, having a tune doesn’t grant carte blanch for a dealer to assert or a manufacturer to enforce a blanket warranty denial on unaffected parts. burnt valve, hole in the piston from detonation, rod through the block etc because of the tune - yep, I get that. Unfortunately, I’ve been down this path before. It was 6 weeks to resolve, and I eventually prevailed but I got hooked for the tear down money. In my case corporate heads prevailed before court. My mods were just bolt on stuff - ignition, pulleys, MAS, filter & intake, but of course they made an issue of it. None if had anything to do with the failed timing chain tensioner ( on a v8 also ).

This dealer’s not doing you any favors here, frankly, they’re not being an honest broker either. I would push them for a cause of the failure, and make it clear if it’s not something supported by evidence the tune caused the problem, Ford will need to honor its warranty.

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This is the best most helpful post in the thread. Fact is they need to know the mod contributed to the failure, and they cannot do that until they determine the cause of failure. If it was a bearing failure and the mod did not do anything with the rev limiter I think one could argue the mod had nothing to do with the failure, but it is a hard arguement. Much harder than say the radio or sensor quit working, obviously the tune has nothing to do with that. In the end it really comes down to how much you want to talk/fight with them.

With that said going to another dealer at this point will not help as this would all be on record. (someone else had mentioned doing that earlier).

Also, not familiar with that tune but some tuners offer warranty as well.

This is why I always hesitate to not tune a daily driver. Not saying I have not done it, I have. But my last one, and this one (so far) have remained on factory tune. If I were to do this to my Raptor I would wait until at least 10K to make sure I have a solid truck.

smurfslayer said:

I would push them for a cause of the failure, and make it clear if it’s not something supported by evidence the tune caused the problem, Ford will need to honor its warranty.

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While I agree with what you’re saying, let me play devils advicate against you and myself;

Hi, I’m Ford. We engineered the Ecoboost bearings and lubrication system to handle X pressure exerted, which happens to align with generating 450hp. Your tune added 1hp, which caused premature failure as that load capacity was exceeded.

Get bent.

I would suggest definitely taking a harder line with the dealer service manager. They will probably proclaim their “hands are tied” blah, blah. No, they’re not. The cause of the failure is not known at this point, the only known is that the owner revealed that the truck PCM was refreshed and the dealer would have found this information out anyway. That does not equal a voided warranty. They need to be challenged on this.

The way this went for me before
s/m “we can’t do anything. corporate says any aftermarket powertrain mods = voided warranty”
me: that’s not only not supported by contract law, it’s illegal.
<snipped disagreeing back and forth>
s/m: I’m just telling you what we’ve been told by ford
me: show it to me.
s/m: huh?
me: you were told by Ford right? let’s see the paperwork.
s/m: I can’t show you that
me: because it doesn’t exist. Tell you what, let’s conference call Ford customer service and save us all a bunch of time.
<snipped hemming and hawing>

Customer service actually said I was right, find the cause and if it was caused by the tune, the repair wouldn’t be covered.

me: deal. to be clear, if you tear it down, find out I caused the failure, I pay for the tear down (they agreed).

s/m: Well, I guess that’s ok ...

he clearly didn’t want to help, but when pressed, they cooperated.

There are all manner of troubleshooters and service managers. some are look for the easy way out types, others are the I’ll figure this out if it’s the last thing I do type. The former have to be spoon fed by customers. The latter will typically be more flexible and work with customers.

or, if you have $13k laying around to pay for a replacement engine, that’s an option too.

DrippinRaptor said:

How did they know it was tuned?

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The computer stores everything that was ever changed. My dealer told me that includes forscan.

sounds like maybe you hit a bunch of detonation and then ended up causing a spun bearing and blocking the oil passages. they would have to pull all the logs and see what happened to see if it was detected. wonder if it picked it up and didnt back off timing or whatever it uses to prevent it.

being honest is a great virtue so props to OP.

signalbobby said:

sounds like maybe you hit a bunch of detonation and then ended up causing a spun bearing and blocking the oil passages. they would have to pull all the logs and see what happened to see if it was detected. wonder if it picked it up and didnt back off timing or whatever it uses to prevent it.

being honest is a great virtue so props to OP.

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That makes a lot of sense. You never know I could have gotten some bad gas and like you said, if timing didn’t retard then with the extreme additional force of knock it spun a rod bearing.

And thank you, although 13K feels like it might have been worth more than my dignity right now! Haha

weezy said:

Service manager at the dealer informed me that he had seen this same issue several times on ecoboost engines (not just the Raptor version). What I'm trying to say is, these engines seem to have some inherent problems with lubrication or assembly with respect to the rotating assembly.

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it is interesting that the SM says that they've seen this happen in other F150's. Were those others also tuned? If not, it would seem obvious to me that you'd have a case for a warranty repair?

SilverBolt said:

Tasca has a complete new engine with turbos for $5651.82. https://www.tascaparts.com/oem-parts/ford-engine-hl7z6006a/?c=Zz1lbmdpbmUmcz1lbmdpbmUmaT1UMTc3MDcwNCZyPSZhPWZvcmQmbz1mLTE1MCZ5PTIwMTcmdD1yYXB0b3ImZT0zLTVsLXY2LWdhcw==

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This and 10 hours labor at a quality local shop. Figure another 1k in incidentals.