Chinook RV

Hello All, I am the new guy here, this happened to be the first thread that I landed on and I think I may be able to help, injector cackle on a
7.3 is usually caused by loss of fuel pressure to the injectors,usually the number 8 injector on the passenger side starves for fuel causing this noise, just taking a wild guess with the amount of mileage you say you have on the engine most likely your mechanical lift pump in the valley is going,it is not terribly expensive but a lot harder to change it on a van then in a pickup because of the space, if you have a lot of patience it is something you can do yourself one thing you have to be careful of is to not drop the foot that rides on the cam lobe off into the motor when you're pulling the pump off, ifyou want to try and diagnose it you could have someone check your fuel pressure I believe you want it to be on the higher side of 50 close to 60 PSI if it's under 50 psi then you're probably starving your injectors,changing the pump out because of its age even if it's not the problem probably wouldn't hurt, also you can do an injector contribution test just to make sure all your injectors are working, hope this was of some help.Wade/Duke

Hello again, just wanted to elaborate a little bit on the injector cackle problem,Ford realized this was an issue and then I think somewhere around 1999 started using a different injector and the number 8 spot to correct this problem, don't quote me but I think it was a long stem injector that carried less cc to make up for the lack of fuel pressure, but I would still look to replace that lift pump in your rig because as you said it developed a problem so you didn't always have that problem to begin with. I hate to go on a rant about the Stealership but to just arbitrarily tell somebody they need a new motor without diagnosis gets me really fired up, so I just figured I'd list a couple things that you could do before thinking you need a new motor,you can do an oil analysis this will go a long way in telling you the condition of your bearings depending what metal shows up in the oil it will tell you how warn the bearings are, this usually only costs about $10 to send away a sample of your oil some guys who are really fanatics with their diesel motors do this quite often,another thing that is quite telling is to do a compression test , you can do that by pulling out each glow plug and testing each cylinder,if they all check out within spec then you're pretty much good, the 7.3 like mentioned earlier are pretty much bulletproof they usually run perfectly when all the sensors and components are operating in harmony it's usually not too hard to diagnose a problem because you can usually find out which parameter is not being met and it'll lead you to the to cause usually just need to find out if all the requirements are met like fuel pressure oil pressure and prove all the sensors and components are working properly by diagnosing them one by one unfortunately most Ford dealers have no idea how these motors run and operate a person with average mechanical ability willing to put in the time reading and researching can be an expert understanding the 7.3, Wade/Duke