At this point, you may be wondering "Where has Sky Render and the Evil Pony been?" and "Why is there a picture of a defective, hanging-chad 2000 Presidential voting ballot in this build thread?" and "Why was
Firefly REALLY canceled?"
I shall answer 2 of these 3 questions.
So, to recap. At the end of May--right before Hyperfest--two codes popped up on my Mustang: P0012 and P0014. This occurred with highway-speed stumbling and a lack of low-end power. Silly me took it to those dimwitted douchebags at Hagerstown Ford who did nothing. After taking it to a competent dealer, the Mustang had a VCT solenoid replaced. This did not fix the problem.
I picked up my car for a week to use for pictures and such at our wedding, then took it back to the dealer. Next, the dealer replaced both phasers, oil control units, solenoids, and wiring pigtails on the passenger-side head. The issue still remained.
The master tech working on my car contacted Ford's Tech Support Hotline, who proceeded to run him through a battery of tests on everything electronic on my Mustang, even though the tech told them that the oil pressure on my engine seemed too high. And by "too high," I mean 115 PSI.
Now, you will recall that oil is used to advance and retard the cams in VCT. Indeed, a failing oil pump (causing low oil pressure) can cause VCT issues at idle and low RPMs. However, my VCT issues occured at highway speeds, when there should be plenty of oil pressure...
To make a long story somewhat shorter, the tech finally found the culprit when he was removing an external oil pressure gauge from the rear of the passenger-side head. He located a "piece of silicon" lodged in there. He removed it, cleaned the head, flushed the oil once again, and...
...Voila. The oil pressure was back to normal, and the VCT functioned perfectly, and there were no more fault codes, and
Firefly was back on the air. Well, scratch that last one, damn it.
After consulting with engineering support, it was...
admitted by them that
there were "rare issues" with factory headgaskets on the early 5.0s where the holes for oil passages were not quite punched all the way through, leaving a "hanging chad" that could later detach and wreak havoc in a cylinder head's oiling passages. I was fortunate that my tech was able to discover this before he had to pull the entire cylinder head.
So, the Mustang is back in the garage, but I am rather unhappy at the tech support that Ford provided to the service department. If they knew of this issue, why the FRAK didn't they say something sooner? It's bloody unacceptable that I pay over $30,000 for a car with a warranty that ends up sitting at a dealer for almost a month and a half whilst Ford's supposed experts hem and haw and wonder what the problem might be.
But enough of that. I'm just glad I have my car back!
