Question about switching from parts cannon to actual diagnosis on a 6.0 Power Stroke
I used to be the guy who threw parts at a problem until it went away. Back in March, a customer brought in an '04 F-250 with a rough idle and a miss. I pulled the codes, saw a contribution code for cylinder 5, and my first instinct was to swap the injector. But I decided to actually hook up a scan tool and watch the power balance and fuel trims first. Turned out the injector was fine, the real issue was a chafed wire in the harness near the FICM connector. That one wire cost $3 to fix. The old me would have dropped $400 on an injector and probably still had the same miss, then blamed the customer. I've been doing this 12 years and I'm still learning to slow down. What's the dumbest parts-cannon mistake you've made that a five minute test would have caught?