My turn for VCG's!

[pagluy]

Go me. Car has been running like a dog lately, been smelling sulfur-ish smell on acceleration, etc. Suspecting VCG's, was correct. Car has 67k mi., original fuel filter. Aside from fixing VCG's, mechanic wants to run his machine to clean out the cars fuel system, then replace fuel filter & plugs, and the boots on my coils need replacing (he inspected all coils and found no faults, and no reads of any issues with coils from the computer).

This sound about right or are we missing something else he should do while he's in there?

Just got a call from him, $930 for the whole job. Sounds like a fair price for all the work and parts to me.

 

[NYC LS8]

Your car should be covered under the same Ford program as mine. Call your dealer, give them your VIN and find out before shelling out money that you don't have to. I've had both VCGs, 2 coils, 3 boots and 5 plugs changed all free of charge....and it'll be going back soon for another coil on it's way out that hasn't completely died yet.

 

[pagluy]

Maybe I wish I'd known that applied to VCG's and not just coils before I took it to my mechanic, maybe I don't.

Turns out part of my throttle body was bad(I don't remember exactly if it's the whole thing that needs replaced or just a part, I'll find out the details hopefully tomorrow), but it's overheating big time and is what's been causing my random ETC failsafes since I got the car. I was prepared for the worst in damage, but it's only (ha) a $370 part. I remember reading here it was something like $700.

My mechanic is awesome though, he felt really bad that he gave me the car back after he did all this work to it with this problem, and he told me he's not charging me labor for it. Because the part was overheating, it explains why I never had issues early in the morning, only after trips on the freeway to heat up the engine did it start causing issues.

I had the car for all of an evening before I had to take it back to him, and it went into ETC failsafe twice and finally threw a code for what was wrong with the throttle body, but holy crap I was happy about the difference a fixed VCG/coils/spark plug (and not being covered in oil) makes. The tip of one spark plug was poking out of the oil, that was it.

Sorry for the long post

 

[ILLS]

Glenn I did a VCG change for a fella local to me with an 03 LS. I was amazed at how much oil was in there. In his case 6 out of 8 plugs were soaked in oil. When I pulled the COP's they were literally dripping oil all over the place. I had to put rags down just so I didn't drip oil all over his engine bay. I just changed the VCG's out along with the plugwell seals out and then cleaned his OEM COP's REAL good and reinstalled them. To my knowledge he hasn't had a problem with them since. I think Ford is a little hasty to just swap out to new coils when doing this fix but can understand why they do it for liability reasons.

 

[pagluy]

Good to know Robert, thanks. I was a little nervous about that.