Car Digital Wiringtrackworld

Just a question to see if this is possible or am I being strung a line?

An injector went on my C-max 1.6tdi (yes since buying it I’ve heard the stories since buying it) recently. My local (none dealership) garage replaced it but although it was running it didn’t have any power or consistency and as a result its gone back three times (in limp mode).

Anyway to cut a long story short the garage tried a number of things which didn’t work but finally seem to have sorted the issue (it seems to be running ok and hasn’t had a warning light for the last 300miles).

Their explanation was that the injectors are individually addressed (they have unique codes but I am not sure whether these are mapped automatically or manually). For whatever reason injector 1 was mapped as 3, 2 was mapped as 4 etc, which meant that not only the wrong injector was replaced but when the injector was reprogrammed it meant that it was wrongly coded. It wasn’t until they checked the coding of the original injectors against the coding that they worked out what was going on.

I’ve used the garage for the last ten years and they have always been straight with me. I have no chance of pursuing this with Ford but I am just interested if anyone can tell me how likely this is (while I wait for the additional soot in the turbo to put an end to that).

It’s one of the reasons alot of places won’t replace just one injector. One out all out is a common thing to find.

Are they saying the mapping somehow got corrupted on its own to cause the original fault, or that they messed up the mapping when replacing the first injector and that’s what caused the subsequent problems ?

The 1.6tdci engine (HDi if it’s on a Pug vehicle) does need new injectors coded in, and also needs a short road run afterwards to get the pilot injections sorted out.

Here’s the thing. Ford number the injectors as 1-4 from the cambelt side to the gearbox side (right to left if you’re sitting in the drivers seat). The firing order is 1-3-4-2. All fine so far, you may think.

But there are some gotchas. Some older scan tools don’t read this order correctly, and can present in either the firing order (not seen that for a while) or more commonly, renumber the order in reverse (from gb to cambelt side).

It can even come down the software level of the scan tool.

The most likely thing is that your garage just isn’t that familiar with them and this has caught them out- this was a common story on the Ford forums a few years ago.

Ah, so it was answer c) – they didn’t read the codes correctly and replaced the wrong injector !

Yup!

Their argument was that the initial setup was incorrectly ordered (in my very limited understanding there is only one possible alternative set up which would work but could be wrong. In their defence they are a reasonable size outfit with a good local reputation. Visually their diagnostic kit appears up to date although as with most such garages its generic rather than manufacture specific.

The other thing in their favour is that their diagnostic agreed with the Green Flag engineer on which cylinder was affected (This doesn’t rule out them replacing the wrong one anyway).