Recent content by BadlandsA51

I saw several lightning struck vehicles in my time at Ford. Sometimes it was obvious, the radio antenna would be melted. Other times it took a long search to find a tiny burn spot in the paint. I saw a low mileage Expedition that was totaled by the insurance company. We found no evidence of...

Mirrors are a common source, out of position cowl trim, I’ve even seen grills where they fit to the hood. Wind noises suck!

Try taping over suspect areas and go drive it. If the noise is gone, stop and take some of the tape off. Repeat until noise returns. The last piece of tape you pulled off is the source of the noise. A little tedious, but the best method for finding wind noise. You may want to take a...

Our first trip with our 23 Badlands was over Tin Cup Pass in Colorado. We live in Kansas so off road opportunities are limited here. Tin Cup is a good trail for first timers. There are few challenging spots and it’s pretty rough and rocky, but nothing to tear up a shiny, new rig. The scenery...

Dealer can’t find a water leak and spent SIX WEEKS looking for it?!?! You need to find another dealer. It’s not that hard!

Hydraulic clutches are used partly for packaging reasons. It’s pretty crowded under the hood on most modern vehicles, and it’s easier to route a hydraulic line than to fit in a z-bar and push rods for a mechanical clutch.

With the truck’s high center of gravity, an evasive there’s a greater chance of a rollover without a sway bar. Ford has been through that once with the Explorer. They ain’t going there again.

It is synchronized.

No, you stated that dealers stock very few cars on the lot with manuals and “option them in the crappiest way possible”. I took that to mean they were low equipment level, such as a base Bronco. Many who buy base Broncos do so because they can’t afford a Badlands or Raptor. They don’t want to...

Manuals are on the lower priced inventory units because the customer shopping for an entry level vehicle doesn’t want to pony up for the cost of an automatic. If you stock a loaded $60K Bronco with a 7 speed you have narrowed your customer base way down. You could sit on it for months. If a...

Dealers stock what sells. If everybody came into the showroom looking for a manual transmission, that’s all you would see on the lot. Dealers aren’t trying to shape the market, they are trying to make money selling as many vehicles as they can. You do that by having what buyers are looking...

Much of decline in manual transmission offerings with all manufacturers is the decline in demand. They build what sells. Modern automatic transmissions with lock-up torque converters have pretty much done away with the perceived fuel economy advantages of manuals. And the emergence of paddle...

That is why warranty on clutches is looked at so closely. There is way too much opportunity for people who don’t know how to drive one properly to smoke one while learning how to drive one. And along with the clutches are the transmission behind them.

And, the clutch could have came apart due to shifting to too low of a gear. That could happen on a 5-4 downshift where, instead of 4th, the trans would have pulled into 2nd. That would overspeed the clutch disc and throw the friction facings off. If the driver realized he was in the wrong...

If there wasn’t an over-rev DTC, there’s not any over-rev data stored.