My dealer wants inside my voodoo!!

smsgt350 · May 17, 2017

When I picked up my brand new gt350 in april 2016, I noticed right away that it was using oil. I kept track of it for the first month and found it was going through a quart every 500-600 miles. Compression test was fine so the dealer had a look inside each cylinder with a borescope and determined it needed two intake valve seals replaced. They ordered the seals in May of 2016 with a rush ship vehicle down priority.I still drove my car and after 12500 miles it went through 24 quarts of oil.I use amsoil and changed it every 4000 miles in this period. Fast forward to May 2017 and the valve seals have finally arrived. Ford customer service is embarrassed by how long it took the valves took to arrive and are going to give me a surprise gift upon completion of the work. I would like my new 2018 gt350R in race red please.If not my t shirt size is 3XL. My issue now is that the oil consumption has dropped to around a quart every thousand miles which I can live with however I am nervous as hell to let anyone in my engine!!:shrug:

Clink · May 17, 2017

Eh you'll get a coupon book for 5 free oil changes.

Sorry to hear about your issues, I'd be driving it up to the dealer and make them top it off until they got as annoyed as I was.

lemers · May 17, 2017

This is like asking about doing expensive surgery on a family pet. Some people will do whatever it takes for the pet while others will just get a new pet.

smsgt350 · May 17, 2017

Just curious if anyone has heard of this being done on the 5.2. Ford told the dealer its quite common however I for one have never seen a post on here yet involving valve seal replacement on this engine.

mike15gt · May 17, 2017

It's just valve seals. I've done more work on low hour CAT engines with no problems afterwards.
It's just a repair of seals. I wouldn't be too concerned about it

wildcatgoal · May 17, 2017

I would love to speak with whomever is in charge of parts supply with Ford. I want to understand why, even with mainstream models, the delay is often months for parts.

Evil Minion · May 17, 2017

wildcatgoal said:
I would love to speak with whomever is in charge of parts supply with Ford. I want to understand why, even with mainstream models, the delay is often months for parts.

I actually work for a tier one supplier to Ford and we supply service and spare parts to them as well.

The delays typically come from the fact that no OEM sells service or repair parts out of their own inventory since they all operate on a lean one piece flow model, so they only keep as many in house as the number of cars they are building that week.

So for service or repair parts, there's a separate division inside each OEM that's responsible for warranty work. From what I have seen, they are usually centralized and not very well staffed. So there are a few people dealing with warranty requests from all around the country. Once these people get to a particular request, they then have to contact the supplier that makes that particular part and ask what their availability is to get an extra part for a repair.

Further delays now come in if this particular supplier is running at full capacity already due to a higher than expected demand from the OEM for production (dealing with this personally right now). Production orders are king, so the service part order, even being one single lonely little piece is put on hold until there's a break in the demand from the OEM, which could be weeks or even months worst case.

Then the supplier has to ship it to the warranty team with the OEM. At which point if weeks have passed, that team is busy dealing with other warranty issues, and may not get around to shipping that part to the dealer that requested it for a little while. or worse they get mixed up and send it to another dealer that is having a similar problem and also needs that part, forgetting which one requested it first.

...Long story short, it's a long drawn out process all in an effort to make the regular production as lean as possible in order to sell cars as cheap as possible while still keeping stock prices up :thumbsup:

This is also why the more mainstream a model is with high demand, the longer it can take to actually get a part to the correct dealer.

Zitrosounds · May 17, 2017

@smsgt350 Sucks homie!!! My condolences.

Tank · May 17, 2017

No explanation for the reduced oil consumption??

Seems like you're using less than half of the newly released consumption rate according to GT350 Owners Manual version 3 (page 48) that comes with the new wrench...1 quart every 500 miles.

Were the tests definitive or did you get the sense they were just telling you something not too intrusive to fix (with all due respect to your Dealer and Mechanic)?

Take the parts, see what happens for the next month or so (assuming this is your only concern). Who knows, you might end up using no oil at all!

Also, 6 gallons of oil went through your cats..I remember this being a concern when you first wrote about it. Has Ford offered up anything?

Race Red on your freebie R???? I guess that would be acceptable if AG is no long offered:lol:
Good Luck :cheers:

smsgt350 · May 17, 2017

Tank said:
No explanation for the reduced oil consumption??

Seems like you're using less than half of the newly released consumption rate according to GT350 Owners Manual version 3 (page 48) that comes with the new wrench...1 quart every 500 miles.

Were the tests definitive or did you get the sense they were just telling you something not too intrusive to fix (with all due respect to your Dealer and Mechanic)?

Take the parts, see what happens for the next month or so (assuming this is your only concern). Who knows, you might end up using no oil at all!

Also, 6 gallons of oil went through your cats..I remember this being a concern when you first wrote about it. Has Ford offered up anything?

Race Red on your freebie R???? I guess that would be acceptable if AG is no long offered:lol:
Good Luck :cheers:

The answer they gave me on the cats is that ford is not concerned unless I have noticed a loss of power which I have not.As far as the the valve seals I actually did get the sense that it was somewhat of a guess on fords part as they had suggested it before the borescope test was done.

superman07 · May 17, 2017

If your cats clog prematurely Ford will forget the conversation.

but these suckers flow a ton and run pretty warm when you flog it, Id be shocked it it wasn't mostly burned off.

smsgt350 · May 17, 2017

Evil Minion said:
I actually work for a tier one supplier to Ford and we supply service and spare parts to them as well.

The delays typically come from the fact that no OEM sells service or repair parts out of their own inventory since they all operate on a lean one piece flow model, so they only keep as many in house as the number of cars they are building that week.

So for service or repair parts, there's a separate division inside each OEM that's responsible for warranty work. From what I have seen, they are usually centralized and not very well staffed. So there are a few people dealing with warranty requests from all around the country. Once these people get to a particular request, they then have to contact the supplier that makes that particular part and ask what their availability is to get an extra part for a repair.

Further delays now come in if this particular supplier is running at full capacity already due to a higher than expected demand from the OEM for production (dealing with this personally right now). Production orders are king, so the service part order, even being one single lonely little piece is put on hold until there's a break in the demand from the OEM, which could be weeks or even months worst case.

Then the supplier has to ship it to the warranty team with the OEM. At which point if weeks have passed, that team is busy dealing with other warranty issues, and may not get around to shipping that part to the dealer that requested it for a little while. or worse they get mixed up and send it to another dealer that is having a similar problem and also needs that part, forgetting which one requested it first.

...Long story short, it's a long drawn out process all in an effort to make the regular production as lean as possible in order to sell cars as cheap as possible while still keeping stock prices up

This is also why the more mainstream a model is with high demand, the longer it can take to actually get a part to the correct dealer.

I knew the evil beancounters were probably behind the one year shipping time it took to get my valve seals!! The ' vehicle down' on my order had someone from ford customer service usually contacting me monthly to tell me they were lost in transit or there was a problem at the factory.I actually found it entertaining how many ways these went missing. The whole process was right out of a monty python sketch.Just glad I wasnt waiting on an engine or Ford would have been buying it back and running it through the crusher 6 months ago!!

NipSC4328 · May 17, 2017

Just because I'm curious, does this engine use the cheap neoprene umbrella type seals or the teflon Perfect Circle press on type, anyone know? :shrug:

Screamer · May 17, 2017

Two leaky valve stem seals will not cause it to burn a quart in 600 mi. It has deeper problems. And the seals are spring loaded rubber seals. Almost the same part since 1996

Wriggly · Nov 21, 2017

So what happened here. Car fixed? What was the promised freebie?

My dealer wants inside my voodoo!!

smsgt350

Well-Known Member

Clink

Well-Known Member

lemers

Globetrotter

smsgt350

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mike15gt

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wildcatgoal

@sirboom_photography

Evil Minion

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Zitrosounds

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Tank

9/11 - Never Forget

smsgt350

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superman07

Well-Known Member

smsgt350

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NipSC4328

Well-Known Member

Screamer

Well-Known Member

Wriggly

Well-Known Member