Hey everyone, so i just finished up replacing the engine in my 2000 ranger and started it for the first time today. Everything went fine, i burped the cooling system and took it for a drive. So immediately i noticed with the slightest amount of throttle the engine starts pinging like crazy! At first i thought maybe it needed some fresh gas. So after putting fresh gas and driving around for a few miles it seemed to get slightly better but it's still pretty bad. Before i put the engine in i replaced the timing belt and lined up all the marks perfectly.. If it were to have jumped a tooth on the timing would this cause the pinging? I also changed the plugs and wires while i had everything apart. The CEL did come on after a few miles of driving so i'm going to pull the code tomorrow and see what it says. I just wanted to see if anyone had any ideas on what could be causing the pinging.

 

The CEL code is needed before any guesses here.

 

CEL was for the idle air control valve. P1506.

 

A large vacuum leak could create the pinging you're describing and preventing proper idle control (setting the P1506) code.

 

Now that you mention it, when I had the heater on to bleed the cooling system the air was only blowing out of the defrost vents. In my older mustangs the blend door was vacuum operated. Is the blend door in the ranger still vacuum operated? I wonder if that would be a big enough vaccum leak to cause this pinging and IAC malfunction.

 

It's all vacuum :(

Check the ball in the engine bay (i think)

 

i tested every single vacuum line on this truck and there were no leaks. I drove it again this morning and the idle is still hanging. I'm at wits end with this truck i just don't get what could be the problem. The idle hangs, it pings under any throttle an there is no vacuum leaks. would a MAF sensor cause the pinging and hanging idle?

 

If it thinks it's getting too little air, it will weaken the the fuel mixture, so yes, possible.

 

Yes, clean the MAF sensor

Defrost vent only, means vacuum line from firewall to Vacuum reservoir is most likely damaged, it is a hard plastic Black line usually gets melted by exhaust heat

Blend door is electric, but doesn't control Vent air direction, only heater core air flow
Vents all use vacuum motors, Defrost being the default(no vacuum) vent selection


After engine is warmed up and idling, unplug the 2 wire connector on IAC Valve
RPMs should drop to 500 and engine may even stall, either is good, it means no vacuum leak
If idle stays high then there is a leak, leave IAC Valve unplugged while you pull hoses and plug ports with finger.

 

So I went and picked up a scanner to help trouble shoot the issues I'm having. This is a freeze frame from the computer with the engine OFF. Hopefully someone can read this and interpret what it means. I'm going to warm the truck up and look at the livestream data and get some snapshots.

 

went and warmed the truck up and got a video of the live stream data. I also got a good clip of the knocking sound it makes under load. Let me know what you think.

 

Couldn't tell much from the videos, you kept switching the screen
You want to have the engine warmed up for sure, which you did, to get any valid info
And you want to look at STFT (short term fuel trim), constantly

If the "knock" I kind of heard in video was what you are referring to that is not a pre-ignition ping/knock, thats mechnical

Never used that scanner model so hard to tell what parameters it is using
The O2 sensor should be .1 to .9volts, I saw it go up to 2.x once??? so it isn't using standard scale(parameter)
Instruction book should have that info, and you can often switch any data to a different scale, like MAF sensor to gr/sc(grams per second), which is a more useful parameter