Oxygen Sensor Replacement (Post #587) 9/16/2019

NewO2sensors

I’ve had some issues with the idling on the Big White Bus. Once she is warmed up when I come to a stop sign the idle drops to something like 300 rpms. And eventually she drops lower and finally dies.

I read online that the O2 sensors could be the culprit. I couldn’t remember the last time replaced the O2 sensors. I am not getting Code 43 or 44. As I am not driving her daily I don’t have a good idea what the gas mileage had dropped to. So I decided I’d spend the money and replace. Continue reading “Oxygen Sensor Replacement (Post #587) 9/16/2019”

Oxygen Sensor Replacement (Post #468) 3/18/2014

Its been a while since I installed new oxygen sensors. By my reckoning I installed them about five years ago. I didn’t take a mileage reading then but I can guess it was at least 25,000 miles ago. Oxygen sensors have a life cycle of about 25,000 to 50,000 miles.

DSCN3077
New Oxygen Sensor

If you notice your gas mileage drop by at least 2 mpg you can guess it is your oxygen sensors. They don’t always fail and give you a code 43 or 44. Its part of your regular maintenance like plugs and wires. Continue reading “Oxygen Sensor Replacement (Post #468) 3/18/2014”

Gearing Up for SCARR, Part Four, More Maintenance (Post #465) 3/14/2014

8150025_cst_06812_pri_largI can’t be the only person who gets that special warm feeling inside when all the tick boxes are filled in on maintenance. I love it when I’ve gone over my Land Rover and done all the maintenance.

Fluid and filter swap for the transmission. Also a fluid swap for the transaxle and viscous coupling this weekend. I bought 20 quarts of Castrol® Transmax™ High Mileage – Automatic Transmission Fluid. I had never heard of it until I went to research my options.

It was cheaper than the first fluid I was considering. Royal Purple MAX ATF® was 14.99$(US) a quart. Royal Purple got rave reviews online but at twice the cost I don’t believe it will be 100% better than Castrol. I’ve never been let down by Castrol and I will continue to use it until someone can give me a solid reason to stop. The Transmax was just 6.39$(US) a quart from Advanced Auto Parts. O’Reilly’s did not carry it even though the Castrol’s website said they did.

My new oxygen sensors should also be in today so I will be putting those in as well. As near as my crappy record keeping can determine the last time I swapped O2 sensors was 6 years ago. So with 205,000 miles on the clock it’s time.

I am also installing the new power steering pump this weekend. This is going to be a very busy weekend. I should have probably scheduled a Garage Day with The Evil German Dude and Paparazzi Ford. Paparazzi Ford’s dad is not well and this was EGD’s “on weekend” at work. I don’t have any more time before S.C.A.R.R. so I’m going for it.

This is part four(-ish) of my Mega-Maintenance Month. I’ll pop some pictures up on the individual jobs as I have time to complete blog posts.

Gearing Up for SCARR, Part One
Gearing Up for SCARR, Part Two
Gearing Up for SCARR, Part Three

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

Trans-America, Oh How I Wish I Could Do That (Post #440) 1/30/2014

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdNJeDdaJOc

I am itching to get out and do this. How freaking awesome would this trip be? Sadly I don’t have a month to make a Trans-American Trip happen. But if I did, I’d start tomorrow.

What IS in our sights is the Circumnavigation of the State of Oklahoma. The Range Rover has never been as ready as she is now. I still have to replace the oxygen sensors and sort out a recent throttle position sensor problem that popped up over the weekend. I also have an annoying problem with dust getting in the cab when I drive down dirt roads. Windows up or down, a lot of dust gets in the cab. I need to investigate that as well, but she is about as ready as one could hope.

I feel the need to have a good shake down run with her and crossing the state on dirt roads sounds like the perfect trip. I blogged last year about buying the maps for the Oklahoma portion of the Trans-America Trip. It is a route entirely on dirt across the state. I have a co-pilot lined up in the ever adventurous Mr. Fisher. All I need now is the fuel money and off we go.

This would be a great trip for our new Red Dirt Rovers club. I think it should be run before it is attempted with people one barely know. A major concern I have at this moment is my own personal lack of trail experience (in my Land Rover) and a complete lack of confidence in my ability to lead a group off-road. I have driven off-road, but I have never had the responsibility of other people’s rigs on my head.

 

Garage Day: Titanium Hitch and His New to Him Ford (Post #383) 8/27/2013

Another Saturday, another Garage Day. Wrenching on a old truck with your best friends in the middle of rural farm country is as American as America gets. This time the patient was Titanium Hitch’s 1998 F-150. According to TH the truck had been running pretty rough. It was in bad need of a tune up.

What started out to be an oil change, a brake job, and to investigate the rough running, became an all day ordeal. When we talk about project creep, this project not only crept, it grew as it did. What finally happened was a plug change, oil change, brake fluid change, two O2 sensors replaced, air filter change, and a final sorting out of the sound system problems from the last garage day.

First, the good news, the truck did not need brakes. The pads were deemed to be in satisfactory condition. So TH is going to shelf the pads he bought for another time. The brake fluid was sucked out with a syringe, fresh oil replaced. Then the nipples all got a turn as the bad fluid was evacuated from the lines.

This went exceedingly well with three pseudo-mechanics working on it. +EGD was at the wheels while I filled the reservoir. TH was relegated to pumping. The instructions were pretty tough to follow. Pump the pedal and say when he was pumping. This took a few tries to get perfected. But as with most things TH finally became an expert peddle pusher.

On to the O2 sensors. A lively debate was had betwixt the three of us regarding how many O2 sensors an F150 had. We quickly found what we later learned were the upstream sensors. Only through a parts search did we find out that it had a set for downstream as well. Well hoity-toity for them! We all were surprised and our theories of why it could only have two, like a Land Rover were dashed on the rocks of our hubris.

The codes that were being thrown were thought to be related to the downstream sensors. I’m still a little fuzzy on this but I went with it. Besides the down stream sensors looked to be the easiest to remove. Yeah right!

The driver’s side came out with out much of a problem.
The passenger side was…welded …frozen …rusted WELDFROZTED in.

A great many attempts were made with a great many tool configurations.

We first cut the lead so we could use a deep socket,

We then attempted to sawz-all the sensor,
Then a propane torch was tried,

Then the sensor was cut into pieces with a large bolt cutter,
Finally a socket with a large cheater bar was used to tear the threads off. To get the cheater bar in to play the truck had to be lifted up to the maximum height of 5 ton jack stands. I was quite worried about this, as one mistake and the state’s insurance agencies would be writing a bunch of checks to happy sad widows.

I’m surprised I don’t have a picture of the end result of the sensor. But suffice to say brute force won the day. You can well imagine that the threads were trashed. EGD remembered to grab a tap in the correct size when we went to the parts store to spend some more of TH’s beer money hard earned pay on auto parts. EGD managed to get a few threads cut back into the sensor port and the second was installed. The front sensors were looking pretty bad as well. They were probably WELDFROZTED in as well. None of us wanted to find out. Another problem for another day.
Next was plugs. We should have guessed we’d have problems. The first plug fell apart as the lead was being pulled from it. You can see the center conductor out of its plug in the following picture a long with what was left of the O2 sensor on the right side.
Half the plugs we pulled came apart in one manner or other. After examination of the plugs it was easy to say they were the originals. This was evident by checking what was left of the anodes for spark gap. The plugs were so badly eaten away and the gaps so large I was surprised the truck ran at all. One of the gaps measured .1000. Yes… point 1 thousands. The actual factory plug gap should have been .0560. Two of the plugs measured .0900. I didn’t measure the rest. I hope you can see the ends and how badly eaten away they were in the picture.

I gapped all the plugs with a feeler gauge and they were installed. At some point here a lively debate broke out about the parts we had just picked up. The replacement O2 sensors did not have the correct key on them. It looked to me what little key was there was half-heartedly cut off/ground down.

We looked at the existing up and down stream plugs for comparison. Then we compared them with the one upstream sensor which we could actually reach with out being a contortionist, the passenger side. Sure enough the replacements didn’t match any of the OEM ends. We installed them anyway, trusting that the AutoZone guy gave us the right parts and they were labeled correctly in the boxes.

The oil change was completed in short order. The truck was two quarts low on oil as well. The black stuff that was serving as oil didn’t even fill the five quart jug of the replacement oil.

I had to bail out before the speakers were addressed. I waited long enough until I got to hear the engine with all the new bits. They gave me the honor of firing her up. She roared into life and idled like she was meant to. I’m going to guess she gets 3-4 miles more per gallon of petrol.

About an hour after I got home I got a panicked call from TH asking if there was something I could think of that might have made her run poorly. Seems when TH tried to drive home although idle was good, any application of throttle caused coughing and choking and a poor running motor. It was probably dropping to “limp mode”.

I remembered I had pulled the passenger side O2 lead, but I hadn’t reconnected it. I relayed that and he was off to check it and indeed it was still disconnected. It was reconnected and he made it home.

I talked to TH the following Monday and he told me she was still running rough. During the Garage Day festivities we had had a lively discussion about the Air Idler Valve. If it was half as bad as the other parts, it most likely really needed a good cleaning if not an out right replacement.

It was fun to hang out with my old mates and swap stories and wrench a little in the sub-Saharan African hot Saturday in Oklahoma. I wouldn’t have rather been anywhere else, well perhaps in my pool with Mrs. Okierover, but I got that too so I was a winner all the way around.

Thanks for reading and Happy Rovering.

What? Code 44 again? (Post #304) 11/21/2012

It seems like every time I drive the Range Rover I get a Code 44. This is a GROSS over exaggeration of course. It only happens every other time. 😉
(did I just use an emoticon in my blog? Wow. I need help.)

I saw the Check Engine Light come on during the drive home on Tuesday evening. When I got home I looked at the display but it had not yet decided to tell me what was going on.

So when I got in the her this morning I again noticed the light and stopped to see if I got a code. I snapped this very dark picture at 0625(CST) with my cell phone in the cul-de-sac in front of the house. It was the code I expected to see. The gas mileage is pretty disappointing right now (13mpg). I’ve chalked that up to a wonky transmission but suspected the oxygen sensors as well.

On the drive in and as I was writing this I was thinking “what the hell”? I changed out the oxygen sensors fairly recently. It must be something else.

What else you might ask? That’s a very good question. Let’s go to J.E. Robison’s website for a quote. He has a great website and if I lived anywhere near him (Massachusetts) I’d be dragging my Landie in for his advice and service.

Code 44 – Lambda sensor A – left bank

Code 45 – Lambda sensor B – right bank

If one of these fault codes (#44 or #45) is displayed check the wiring to that particular lambda sensor. In addition this fault will be displayed if the vehicle has a condition which causes it to run very lean or very rich on one side (example – a vacuum leak or a bad injector). This code often appears in conjunction with the misfire codes in cases of bad ignition misfire (cross-firing plug wires) If both codes are displayed, the voltage supply to the heater coils of the sensors must be checked. Check for 12V appearing on the O2 signal lead, and check the heater circuit for shorts.

So as you can see there is a lot to get under the bonnet and take a look at. The vacuum hoses are a serious concern. Considering in the last two years we have had some weather extremes. Two summers with 120(F) temperatures followed by two winters with temperatures down to 5(F). This kind of weather is hell on rubber bits. I swap our wiper blades more often than I buy trousers for work.

So what if I don’t find anything out of place I replaced these just a year or two ago. Is that right?

I go back and look through the blog and find the last time I wrote about oxygen sensors for the Range Rover was November 2003. And my last evidence of me actually replacing them December 2003. Seriously? That can’t be right. Is it?

I see that I swapped the oxygen sensors for the Discovery in 2008 just before we reenacted National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) and took the Mother Road out to California. Did I replace the O2 sensors back then on the Range Rover as well? I have a feeling I may have.

That is actually good news, because that was 4.5 years ago. I can live with that replacement rate. However I’m not real happy with the miles on these if they were replaced in 2008. But if I replaced them in 2003, I can seriously live with that.

So while the weather is still nice over the Thanksgiving holiday I will take a look around and see if anything is out of sorts. If no, I will order some O2 sensors.

Lookin’ good in Uptown.
Parked in front of Tucker’s Onion Burgers
on N.E. 23rd in OKC.

Thanks for reading and Happy Thanksgiving to all you out there. We have so much to be thankful for here in Oklahoma.