Cam Phaser/Engine Failure Reports

Only if you raise the concern and document the issue -during- the warranty period and the part lets go within a subjective amount of time / mileage, the manufacturer could be on the hook for the repair and legal expenses. Obviously it depends on a variety of circumstances, but if your 33,000 mile service ticket says ‘customer concerned they may have filing cam phasers’ / and it’s returned NPF, then at 40,000 miles you lose one, or have failure related to it, yes, you can in some instances sue and win.

Particularly if you have video illustrating the problem; hell, I would go as far as to video me showing them the video, if it were me. People love visual aids, and if you show a flippant, uncaring or unconcerned service advisor, service manager, or tech, juries love to punish stupidity. More importantly, if you let customer service know and play the wronged customer card, they just may intervene and compel a repair - because they know the company could be hooked too.

OPT PRIME said:

You wouldn’t know mine was causing problems unless you turned Advanced Trac off and nailed it for a few gears. You had to be making good boost in order for the timing to rear it’s ugky head.

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So I had a really bad miss fire the other day and it almost caused me to have a wreck. I hammered it going around 70 to pass some people in traffic and it felt like the engine completely died. Oil warning light went off, no power, no oil pressure. I pulled over and it had plenty of oil. Restarted it and it ran fine. Could that have been the timing issue u are speaking of? If it was, do u think it threw a code that the dealer could see if he checked to help make my case? He wants to keep my truck and start it until it makes the noise which would be months. I sent him 10 videos of it making the noise and that’s not good enough. I have the extended warranty and my current plan is to keep driving it until it gets really bad. I would rather fix it tho.



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Crash45 said:

So I had a really bad miss fire the other day and it almost caused me to have a wreck. I hammered it going around 70 to pass some people in traffic and it felt like the engine completely died. Oil warning light went off, no power, no oil pressure. I pulled over and it had plenty of oil. Restarted it and it ran fine. Could that have been the timing issue u are speaking of? If it was, do u think it threw a code that the dealer could see if he checked to help make my case? He wants to keep my truck and start it until it makes the noise which would be months. I sent him 10 videos of it making the noise and that’s not good enough. I have the extended warranty and my current plan is to keep driving it until it gets really bad. I would rather fix it tho.



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I had this happen once and have since switched to driving in sport mode and it hasn’t happened again. Code said cylinder 6 misfire.


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K1llD4shN1n3 said:

I had this happen once and have since switched to driving in sport mode and it hasn’t happened again. Code said cylinder 6 misfire.


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Appreciate the thought, but I was in sport mode. I was just curious if it has something to do with the cam phaser. I think I am going to have to either let the thing blow up or go to another dealer to get this fixed. I was hoping a thrown code might help prove my case...

I have multiple videos, including day before, day I dropped it off, and minutes after picking it up all with start up rattle/and or tick once warm. In total I have 4 visits to the same dealer for low oil/cam phaser noise in 6 months. We can all see where this is leading to.

Just wanted to add a few things. I will follow up this tomorrow with photos of the internals of the Gen2 internals of the phasers.

The cold soak and sitting 24-48+ hours and cold start rattle is the cam phaser not holding oil pressure so when it starts that phasers “clack” back and forth. There is a second issue I’m working on right now and that is the absolutely less than ideal primary timing chain tension designs. They do not use a ratcheting style tensioner and it is a spring and oil pressure loaded tensioner (aluminum not cast iron) and it is held by a small wire clip. The wire clip, and in my opinion the tensioner sin general are one time use items and the design is bad.

We have currently none ford tensioners in our gen1’s and they work flawlessly. I’ve purchased 40 different tensioners and none fit but we are close. I’d say we should have something within a month, fingers crossed.

The other thing with cam phasers. They have one pin thru the phaser locating them. If this shears off it is no good, but they further could use an additional dowel to take some load of the one dowel which has a lot of pressure on it from the external phaser spring.

I’m very curious what y’all see is the most failed timing related part, and then perhaps list in order of lost common to least? If anyone is up for helping supply some good insight to what the key failures are we can focus some time directly on those. The tensioners are on my radar already, I’m curious if anyone has specifics on if and what is failing on the phaser or if it is a cold start “clack” only.

Advise- if you have a cold start rattle or clack, put your foot to the floor, wait for oil pressure to come up and then let it start. Your rattle will be gone and injectors will not be firing at all. Just a helpful tip to keep your wear down if you want to

RMB_Ryan said:

Advise- if you have a cold start rattle or clack, put your foot to the floor, wait for oil pressure to come up and then let it start. Your rattle will be gone and injectors will not be firing at all. Just a helpful tip to keep your wear down if you want to

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Not sure I follow what you're describing. Are you saying touch the start button without your foot on the brake to turn the truck on, press the throttle to the floor and wait for a few seconds, and then start?

Day 71 at the dealer today and still no end in sight for this issue.

Spoke with my service manager today about cam phaser noise. (It just started, light and quick noise) She was super cool, basically told me told me to get a video of it. Bring it in to cold soak over night, if they get the noise in the morning they'll order the parts and have me bring it back when parts arrive.

Nice, my local shop claims it's "normal".