1997 f250/150
 

It's one of those weird seven lug F250's, which would later be called a F150 with the HDPP. It's a 5.4 truck and I think for the question at hand it's easier to just think of it as a F150.


Apparently it hadn't been driven in a couple months. The owner drove it a few miles, it ran bad, the CEL began to flash(engine misfire most likely), they shut it off and then it wouldn't restart.

This truck is the most rusty truck I've ever worked on, I could probably pull the box off with no tools. So I'm trying to get it running without buying more stuff than needed.

The first thing I did was check battery voltage, it was 9 something, deader than dead. I put it on a charge for a couple days and it seems to have come back to normal voltage. I tried to start the truck, I get a clunk at the solenoid and sometimes the door locks lock and unlock quickly(Goofy stuff like this usually make me think a ground is bad somewhere). I cleaned up the battery cables and cleaned up the connections at the solenoid, no change. I jumped the two big wires on the solenoid, nothing. I went underneath to check the positive wire at the starter, it was corroded through and broke off the starter.

I put on a ford factory replacement positive cable on it. It connects to both big wires on the solenoid, the battery positive, and the two wires at the starter, just like the original. I was hoping this would be my fix since the old cable was clearly bad. No change. Same thing happens when I try to crank, thunk at the solenoid and nothing happens. I again jumped the two big wires across the solenoid, nothing. Doesn't even spark.

If I jump across the 2 big wires at the solenoid shouldn't it crank over? I tried it with the key in the run position but shouldn't it crank regardless of what the key is doing? Does the fact that nothing happens say the solenoid is good?
All of the positive cables between battery and starter and the solenoid are new. There is ground that goes from battery negative to the starter body and it looked fine but I didn't take it apart.

If I check the battery negative to ground cable and it checks out fine have I eliminated everything but the starter and therefore the starter must be bad?

But then what caused the engine misfire? What caused the battery to be run down to 9v? Why the broken positive starter wire?

Replaced the starter and everything seems to be back to normal now.