Congratulations, you own the absolute worst diesel engine Ford and Navistar have ever built and put in anything. For what It’s worth, I had a 2004 and put up with that miserable pos for 2 years before seeing the light and being told by Ford they didn’t want me driving their trucks any more. I said I hadn’t been in the last 6 months, I’d been riding in a Chevrolet wrecker with it on the back. I now have a Dodge 5.9 Cummins and couldn’t be happier.
I could go into what is likely wrong with your engine, but it would be a very long and complex post to do so. Trust me, I have a very good idea what’s wrong with it, and you are looking at major expense to fix it. It will not be the last problem you will have with that pile of junk once it begins to have problems. There are a very few places that fuel could actually get into the coolant and it involves the heads. A head job requires removing the truck’s entire cab to get to the engine to be able to work on it. Are you sure it isn’t oil? Oil in a diesel smells like fuel. Most oil in the coolant problems have the same source in the heads.
Ford has lost hundreds of millions of dollars performing warranty work on these engines. They sued Navistar over the warranty problems. Federal courts became involved, shipments of engines to Ford only continued under court order after Ford tried to extract payment for warranty claims from money owed Navistar for engines. Ford has taken the attitude that they will not do any more to these engines other than keep them running and hope they can drag things out till the warranty is gone and it’s your problem.
Here’s what I would do, and this is coming from someone who lost thousands on one of these piles of garbage.
So long as it would still run, I would drive it to the Dodge/Chevy Dealer and trade it if they will actually trade for it. These things are well known problems and some dealers won’t consider trading for them at all. You’ll be dollars ahead for it to become someone else’s problem and not yours.
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