2003 Ford F-150 5.4L - Mysterious Oil Leak
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General Information: The customer came in with a complaint that oil is slowly leaking out of their truck. The want it fixed because it keeps leaving oil spots in their driveway.
First Thoughts: I hate leaking components. Whether it’s oil, powers steering fluid, or transmission fluid, somehow it ends up all over me. It’s important to wear safety glasses when getting under a vehicle that’s leaking, it’s not fun to get that stuff in your eyes.
Diagnostics: When diagnosing a leaking it’s important to work from the top to the bottom. Fluids are not going to leak upwards. ( I’ll share an exception a little later.)
I started with looking a the valve covers. They tend to be a common leak on most vehicles. They were fine. I looked down the front and back of the engine and did not see any signs of leaking from the top.
The next thing I did was lift the car up on the drive-on lift. I instantly saw oil everywhere.
It’s important to remember that when a vehicle is leaking and going down the road, wind can carry the leaking fluid to many different parts of the vehicle. A radiator could be leaking and you might think the water pump is leaking because wind has blown coolant on to the front of the engine. The radiator fan can do the same thing.
With that in mind, I washed off the vehicle with brake clean. I usually clean the vehicle better than the picture below but the leak was very noticeable even with gunk and oil everywhere.
It’s hard to see in the picture, but oil is coming from where the oil filter housing meets the engine block.
A new gasket for the oil filter housing fixed this vehicle.
As you can tell from the picture, oil gets moved everywhere from driving down the road and the radiator fan. It’s important to wash off the area you suspect is leaking with Purple Power or brake clean before diagnosing the leaking.
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