Major Ecoboost repair, long delays

Turtle n Peeps wrote:

Groover wrote:
She took it to a local mechanic that seemed to have a good reputation but also he was the only one that would take the truck in quickly. The mechanic diagnosed the problem as a failed electric vacuum pump that had self destructed and some of the debris got sucked into the engine. The debris made a mess of the passenger side head. After working on it for about 2 weeks he told her that it was fixed and to take it away. It was far from fixed but did make to my house in Tennessee where I borrowed a truck with a gooseneck hitch to get her horses the rest of the way to Dayton.

So many questions:

#1. Did you physically see the damage to the head or even a picture?

#2. So what did the mechanic do? Recon the head? Get a junk yard one? Buy a new one from Ford?

#3. What does far from fixed mean? Is is low on power. Runs rough? Smokes? Knocks?

#4. Did you take it back to the first guy and tell him it runs bad?

#5. Was the turbo replaced? If not why not?

#6. Was any pistons replaced? If not why not?

A lot of this doesn't make much sense to me. I haven't heard of one instance that the vacuum pump blows up and kills the engine. Not saying it can't happen but it just seem sus to me.

Maybe after seeing the answers to the above questions I can give more help.

I will answer #4 first. The guy had worked on it for two weeks and missed about 6 promised completion times. The owner was on vacation and unreachable when the shop told us to come get the truck. It was running rough and smoking badly but they swore that it would all clear up in a few miles. Also, the running boards had been badly damaged. It looks like they did not get the lift properly positioned at least once. We were on a tight schedule to relocate and had already given up both the rental property and the horses's barn stalls.

It ran very rough, smoked, the turbos did not work, multiple error codes that wouldn't clear and a vacuum line was dangling from the top of the motor.

It is 900 miles back to San Antonio and I see no point in going back there anyway.

The passenger side head had been worked on and two valves replaced along with several other things but much of what we were told did not really make sense. We were able to recover a big chunk of the bill from the credit card company.

The dealer hasn't been excited about fixing someone else's mess and wanted to go with a long block. At the time that made sense to me but with the roadblocks we have run into I may not have a choice but to get someone to dive into the engine and try to fix it.

I have asked the dealer to at least run a compression test and start making alternate plans if the long block option appears to be dead.