Berman's 7.3 build

dsberman94

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well figured id start a build thread for my truck and what has happened to it.

Purchased truck spring 2013 with a lot of general maintenance performed. New turbo, new injector o-rings, differentials serviced, trans recently flushed, with a chip and crappy monitor.

Drove the truck home and almost got pulled over for speeding on the way.

Drove it for 3 weeks before **** hit the fan. Blew o-rings on 5 injectors as well as transmission loses the direct drive. no 3rd gear no reverse. get truck towed to my friends house and dropped the trans out. brought it to the transmission guys house and payed $1700 for a dual disc tc, trans go tugger shift kit, and new solenoid pack. Bought an entire kit from Pensacola diesel for new injectors. installed them and put everything back together and started it up. horrible miss at idle. disassembled the motor and tore them back out in under half an hour. since my original injectors were bad i sent them to rosewood and did the budget stage 2 rebuilds and he put new o-rings on. got them back and dropped them in. at this time i disconnected the TS6 pos chip and the quadzilla monitor. Ordered a hydra and insight. got the hydra and insight and hooked everything up. During transmission reinstall the front trans line threads got messed up. this caused an extra 3 week delay in getting my truck back. but its all fixed now.

start the truck up and go to move it and nothing but the OD light flashes. hook up a scanner and it has thrown every trans code possible. something clicked in my head that said hook up the old quadzilla monitor. everything works again and no more trans codes while that monitor is hooked up to the MAF and oil temp sensors. still is to this day because noone knows what the issue is or how to fix it so i tucked it up under the dash and it stays there now.

finally got the truck hooked to its first sled. pulled in the wrong gear and took it easy on her. pulled 244' which i considered ok for a first time. next year will be a different story.

During this time we moved. I lost both garages to work in so now everything has to be done either in the yard or in the street out front and i hate it.

Drove it for about 2000 miles and started to notice a terrible sound under boost. checked for leaks and couldn't find any. drove it for another 100 miles and the sound progressively got worse. finally decided it had to be the turbo. took off the intake pipe grabbed the shaft and found about 1/4 inch of axial play. great. that was new about 6000 miles ago. still looks shiny and new sitting in the shed waiting for a rebuild. decided if its worth doing its worth overdoing and went with a 38r instead of just rebuilding the one on the truck. got the 38r after going through the run around with UPS and eventually just telling them to hold it at the distribution center and ill pick it up. brought it home, unpacked it, stuck a 1.5 liter soda bottle in it, took a pic and sent it to my buddy. the response was pretty funny as he was used to the size of his e99 turbo.

at the same time i asked him when he wanted to help put it on the truck. so we were out later that week installing it. while i was waiting for him to get here i started pulling stuff off and had everything done except for the pedestal bolts. so he got here and we take the old turbo out and compare. i like what i see. we start installing the 38r. set the new o-rings on the pedestal and set the turbo down. put the bolts in and torque them down. we figure leave the hardest for last and left the up-pipes till last. got the downpipe hooked up and the intake and the x pipe. go to get the up-pipes to line up and nothing lines up at all. we try ratchet straps pulling and everything we could think of. nothing works. its dark at this point so we decide to finish the next day.

come back the next day after work and decide to pull everything back apart. so off comes the downpipe, intake, and x-pipe. pull out the pedestal bolts. lift the turbo off the pedestal line it up with the up-pipe and set the turbo back down. bolts don't line up perfectly. finally take and hour and get that figured out and torque the bolts back down. hook everything back up. fingers crossed fire the truck up. no leaks, slightly funny smell which must have just been new turbo smell because it went away shortly after. let it idle a few minutes then go for a nice easy drive for about 5 miles. then we got to a mountain. start being a little more rough going up the mountain listening to the whistle with no talking and no music. turbo was music to our ears.

everything was good up to almost 2 months ago when i introduced the passenger side front of the truck to a 8 inch diameter pine tree. ***ed that pine tree up but it got my bumper headlight hood and fender. took it to the bodyshop and the estimate was $4k. so that still isn't done as i can't afford my insurance to go up if i report it. gonna end up doing it slowly over time. however headlights couldn't wait so i ordered a set of 07 style lights cut the header panel and got them in. looks good now.

of course the esof vacuum hubs went bad so theyre replaced with milemarkers. they also look good. added a little shiny.

next i wanted to get the stacks off for the winter. the broken cell phone speaker and loud stacks werent working for me. ordered a 4" turbo back dual stainless kit from diamond eye. decided to leave them dumped over the axle. the little bits of smoke before the turbo lights just sit where its put now and it looks good. sounds pretty good. stacks go back on for next summer though.

so for now shes estimated at about 350 hp. plans for a 500 HP build are being worked on. im not going to go crazy on it because forged rod blocks are somewhat cheap and ill be happy with 500-550. ive got one available but it needs piston rings if i buy it and im not sure whether its actually forged rod or not.

250/200 injectors from P.I.S. to start. Honey badger HPOP. Comp 910 valve springs. Hutch and harpoon. Regulated return. Head studs. Hoping to be able to use the 38r but i might grab a brute 66 from no limit depending on how it goes.

As for cosmetics there are a couple plans. I found a nice camo pattern on moonshine attire which is called wildfire. pretty cool. ive decided to put that on some interior parts. Some dash parts some parts on the door panels and the front pillars. Also thinking about putting it on the 08 XLT wheels i have. going to be running 305/60 r18's on them on a 2.5 inch spacer. Have to get some fender flares to cover rust unfortunately. its gonna ruin the look for now but ill get a whole new bed eventually. When i get the new style 08 mirrors im thinking about color matching them to oxford white and sending them out to get a snow pattern camo put on them.

I don't have pictures on the computer so none here for now but ill get them off the phone eventually but this is what happened and the plan for the near future.
 

dsberman94

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im not big on picture taking while working on stuff but ive got some.
 

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dsberman94

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dsberman94

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finally got the eas egt set up. she runs a little warm right now so i think it needs some extra fuel to keep it a little cooler. at between 60-70% throttle it holds around 1050 at first then climbs to 1300 fairly quickly. but its burning superclean once the turbo lites so im hoping to get some extra cash to order some tunes from gearhead next week.
 

bruce

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finally got the eas egt set up. she runs a little warm right now so i think it needs some extra fuel to keep it a little cooler. at between 60-70% throttle it holds around 1050 at first then climbs to 1300 fairly quickly. but its burning superclean once the turbo lites so im hoping to get some extra cash to order some tunes from gearhead next week.

:fustrate:
 

dsberman94

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Need to hook mine up too. Not too keen on the taping the manifold though…


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i was a little sketched about it at first but it went smooth. its harder doin it laying on your back than it would be doing it with the truck on a lift. it was harder to push up on the tap to get it to thread when laying down.
 

bruce

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by who? equal amounts of fuel in less time is cooler but more fuel is gonna be hotter. gearhead tunes will prolly be cooler than what you have though
 

Powerstroke214

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i was a little sketched about it at first but it went smooth. its harder doin it laying on your back than it would be doing it with the truck on a lift. it was harder to push up on the tap to get it to thread when laying down.

Yea, I don't have access to a lift, so it's probably gonna suck.


by who? equal amounts of fuel in less time is cooler but more fuel is gonna be hotter. gearhead tunes will prolly be cooler than what you have though

I'd definitely try a tuning change before anything else.


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dsberman94

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dam, ya know, i really need to stop listening to people at pulls. lol. i think that should be a given though. i really want some no limit tunes but obviously that isn't happening on the hydra right now. some PHP custom tunes would be great too but i kinda want the tunes asap not in 4 to 6 weeks.
 

dsberman94

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Yea, I don't have access to a lift, so it's probably gonna suck.




I'd definitely try a tuning change before anything else.


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yea the whole laying in metal shavings thing is gonna be fun. always is. the bad part is i want to do the passenger manifold as well then the downpipe.

ive known ive needed better custom tunes for a while but i just havent gotten around to ordering them. thought id have single shots sooner so i waited. didn't happen and won't happen till i get the forged rod block going. just been running the PHP generics since july. i must have had the egts up around 1500-1700 before and never known it.
 

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