A fairly wise...
A fairly wise old man had told someone not very long ago, “Things aren’t always as they appear.” Luckily for me I’ve had that echoing through my head seeing that I was the one who spoke those words.
It appeared to me yesterday that I had a serious problem with my pickup truck and could have been looking at several hundred, if not into a couple of grand, if it was the transmission needing repaired.
I grew up...
I grew up working on cars, trucks, and tractors so I’ve turned a wrench or two in the past. Things today are nothing like the days of old when it comes to mechanics.
The days of old though were “pre-computerized “ cars and trucks and now it seems you can’t do anything in repairing a vehicle without some electronic computer device or even a laptop computer. Some vehicles actually have where the car will display the fault codes on the dash, if you know how to access them.
I decided before...
I decided before I would take my truck to the transmission shop, (because I thought it was having transmission trouble), that I would “scan the vehicle computer” with a little hand held device that I bought last year when working on the van. That was a good decision on my part.
When your “check engine” light is displayed on the dashboard that light is telling you the computer has registered a problem that needs some attention. Those types of notices associated with the check engine light are known as “hard codes”. The only way you can get rid of them is by clearing the codes stored in the computer. Normally you would have that cleared after you had the problem resolved.
There is a second type of “code” known as a “pending code” which means the computer hasn’t decide fully yet that there is a problem, but something might be a problem. My truck didn’t have the check engine light displayed but I figured there had to be at least a pending code since the truck messed up on me twice in one day.
The scan just...
The scan just takes a couple of minutes from start to finish at the most and it did reveal a pending code on my truck. I was able to take that pending code and look it up online and just like that I knew I didn’t have a transmission problem.
My pending code was P02111 and that code indicated a throttle body problem, more specifically a stuck open throttle body. The throttle body is the device that opens and closes to let in the correct amount of air into the combustion chamber of the engine.
By not fully closing it was messing up the air / fuel mixture and the computer was saying, “whoa partner” and not allowing the engine to do more than just idle. The truck would then go into LIMP mode, which means exactly that, you can slowly limp back to somewhere at about 3 miles an hour.
I incorrectly assumed...
I incorrectly assumed that it was a transmission related problem with my truck because I had a 2012 Ford that did have a transmission problem at about the same miles that are on this truck right now.
That problem in the 2012 truck was a speed sensor issue and it required some pretty extensive tearing down of the transmission to replace that unit. The speed sensor problem had triggered LIMP mode too, now you see how I made the association?
Checking that computer with scanner tool saved me both time and most likely a bunch of money. I was able to repair the truck in less than an hour and spent a whooping $16 on doing it myself. I barely broke a sweat to since it was cloudy and the temperature was only in the low 80’s Tuesday morning.
I took a ....
I took a couple of photos of the unit after it came off the engine before I cleaned it up. It definitely was “nasty” and in my rush to beat the rain I failed to get a shot of it once it was cleaned. But it cleaned up well, went back on like a glove and runs fine now.
“Things aren’t always as they appear” is a good thing to keep bouncing around in your mind.
Until next time,
Sult