2018 - 2020 Ford F150 Oil Loss or Oil Consumption Technical Service Bulletin

2018 - 2020 F150 5.0 V8 NA

Trying to keep my fellow truck camper friends informed, this seems to be the only group who appreciates my write ups and sharing. Other groups complain and moan

So today at the dealer I ran across a new technical service bulletin that I didn't know was out on oil consumption

I ran a relative compression check and I didn't find any issues with the motor at all

At Idle - I monitored short-term fuel trim and long-term fuel trim and didnt Find any issues at all

I went on a test drive and I monitored upstream and downstream O2 sensors and I could see during the down shifting periods on this vehicle there was a slight blip or mishap in the way it was reading oxygen wise and I was like what the heck man something is odd between the shifting points here and it was normally on downshifts between upshifts or something to that extent it was so quick it was hard to pinpoint without an onboard recorder hooked up

The original customer concern was oil consumption but I wanted to verify this for myself not Just look directly at the technical service bulletins even that's what I should have done I wanted to expierience or see an issue looking at data

Often times Techs wont go the extra step that I did to look at fuel trims because they are lazy and just want their check out time and do minimal work and just write it up as NPF ( no problem found ) I can not do that to someone and luckily I work at a dealer that takes pride in FIX IT RIGHT THE FIRST TIME

After racking my brain and getting very frustrated I went to the technical service bulletins and found an updated bulletin for 2018 to 2020 Ford F150 with the 5.0 Coyote engine V8 naturally aspirated

I have a video showing you the new dipstick that we put in the vehicle and talking about the programming and showing you some of the steps I take to get into the computer and things like that but not super important to most

So basically whenever the truck starts to downshift the computer starts shutting down injectors to conserve fuel and whenever those injectors come back online whenever driver demand via the gas pedal being pushed and it sees the accelerator pedal position sensor show two opposing signals ( voltage wise ) it's a dual signal Accelerator Pedal Sensor....one going up one going down in voltage it knows it wants more fuel or less basically saying the drivers putting his foot back into the gas wanting to go faster or more power.... it starts engaging those injectors again

When it takes injectors away and then brings them back online really quick it creates this vacuum and it sucks the oil up from the crankcase into the intake and we basically start burning oil during your downshift and then acceleration event because it's trying to conserve fuel but in order for the cylinders to catch up the other ones have to work so much harder it creates this excessive amount of vacuum and the fix to it is Ford wanting us to reprogram the computer so the injectors don't get pulled off line during a downshifting event and only during Cruise operation if that Vehicles built with the fuel saving programming

The older F-150s were direct injection but we were having a lot of carbon buildup on the back of the valves....40k miles as I'm pulling these engines apart looked like 150k miles with the amount of carbon/soot build up so they started doing a direct injection and port injection for multiple reasons

( Guys With turbo engines started running CATCH CANS to stop the calves from becoming carbon coated as fast )

With Port and Direct I injection -
better start up capability
more power could be built and the back of the valves now start getting cleaned instead of letting them get junked up with carbon buildup

now with this being a naturally-aspirated engine there's no reason for that but the newer vehicles are starting to go to that port and direct-injection style just to eliminate driveability concerns

So basically the gist of it is we put a new dipstick in - for some reason Ford moved the warning indicator hole further down the dipstick on the new one

We change the oil and put a new filter on it 8.75qts 5w20 and a Fl 500 filter

And reprogram the computer to stop the injectors from getting shut down on downshifting events so it doesn't create excessive vacuum and then start pulling oil from the oil pan into the intake whenever they come back online

I've explained everything here but I'm going to leave a video from my YouTube that I made today while I was kind of explaining things and showing you what I was doing at the same time