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on to phase three....172 too rich!

gto4evr

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July 19, 2007
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Year, Model & Trim Level
'98 XLT
Hey guys,

thanks for the help so far on my 98 explorer 5.0! I've finished the nightmare heater core replacement, I've finished dropping the exhaust to fix the hack welding job some previous owner did when they cut the pipes behind the front cats to remove the motor for some reason, I've replaced all 4 o2 sensors and now the final problem: Truck runs too rich. when it's cold it starts on the first crank, when it's hot it cranks for eternity and when it finally catches you can smell gas like it's flooded itself to death. It's throwing code 172 right bank too rich. I've cleaned the MAF, I've replaced the MAF, there's no vac leaks I can find, the EGR is not stuck and the manifold to EGR pipe's been replaced so there's no cracks. DPFE was replaced as well. I had access to a decent scanner today and drove around with it. Long term Bank 1 fuel trim shows -20% and Long term Bank 2 fuel trim shows -10% If I'm understanding that correctly that means that the computers running bank 1 at 20% lean to try compensating for running rich and 10% on the left bank. I heard somewhere it throws a code at 15% variance so that's why I'm not getting an error on the left bank?

Fuel pressure test on the regulator seemed fine. per my research, pop the vac line off the regulator. Pressure comes up to 40psi and stays there. If it's bad it would fluctuate and/or fuel would come out of the diaphragm. Mine is dry and pressures steady. When it's all connected I'm running at about 34 psi and it'll surge up to 40 on quick throttle before dropping back to 34. After I shut it down, it's losing pressure. After 2 minutes I'm down to 30 psi, after 5 minutes it's down to 20 psi, after an hour it's down to 8 psi. When I started chasing this, I wasn't having such a huge drop in pressure.

I'm thinking everything is pointing to leaking injectors. I can't get past the fact that when I first bought the truck, I had a fuel leak in the line that I later found was due to someone cutting the steel braid covered flex hose near the steering column and clamping a piece of 3/8" air hose over it. When I took that crap off I could see some deteriorating rubber schrapnel that I'm sure must have got up inside the line and since this splice occurred after the fuel filter, it had to have let some crap up into the injectors. Since the motor ran fine I never really pursued it beyond dumping a ton of injector cleaner in it but since I live in NY, I can't get this truck through inspection with the CEL on so now that it's overdue, I need to fix this!

So anyone got any other ideas beyond dropping a ton of money on new injectors?

Thanks!
Dennis
 






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