Auto Woes

[Janderso]

I pulled the dash and removed the WIN module

WTF?
Well done sir. I'm not that athletic

 

[Charles scozzari]

RJ,
It takes a real man to admit your minivan is your do it all ride.
I admire you for it.
A Ford long bed Super Crew is my dream vehicle. I've had one for over 25 years.

Reading through the comments it seems like you have plenty of advice. From, buy a Toyota next time, to fix it or sell the van etc.
Auto repair is expensive. What isn't these days.

As a long time Ford dealer employee I know why repairs are so expensive.
We have to grin and bear it and hopefully choose vehicles that will serve our needs dependably for many years to come.

I'm sorry to hear about your troubles.
Good luck my friend.

I had Chevys, both crews and Ssuburbans (new) since the early 90s but in 2016 switched to a new F150 Super Crew and new I should have done much earlier on. Then in 2019 got a new one that really gave me a run for my money. At 30.000 the trans. went and I had enough and went back a G.M. car. BUT I liked my Ford crew cabs. I saw/see a growing admiration towards earlier 09 to 2014s and decided to get one. I found super clean in and out 174.000 mile Super Crew 150 6 1/2' bed with the 5.0L motor out of PA> used to pull a vacation trailer but very well cared for at $12.000 and absolutely love it. P.S. I still have a 1990 Squarebody Chevy 3500 8' bed crew for around town also.

 

[Janderso]

An update on the situation.

I gave up on trying on bypass the ignition switch module. Energizing the starter with a manual switch while turning the key fob to the start position turns the starter but either the ignition or the injector circuits aren't energized. I attempted to pull the WIN module without pulling the dashboard and although I was able to unfasten it not without some trouble, I found that I couldn't actually remove it without completely removing the dashboard. Fortunately, I found a very good step by step procedure on YouTube (whatever you need to do, someone has done it before and made a YouTube video ).

I pulled the dash and removed the WIN module. Opening it up, I saw that instead of contacts, it used optical interrupters for switching. In my experience, if they fail, they stay failed but I did notice a small amount of debris which may have blocked one of the interrupters. There was no indication of any bad solder joints and I put the module together and reinstalled it. The car started on the first try.

However, in my experience dealing with intermittent problems, just when you think you have them fixed, they come back to bite you in the rear so my thought was to not reassemble the car until I had a large enough number of successful first time starts under my belt. The reasoning was if the failure to start on a first attempt happened about 30% of the time, the probability of a successful first time start after a "fix" was the probability of a pre-fix successful first time start (.7) in N successive attempts was .7exp N. For N = 20, that would be .0008 and the probability of actually fixed the problem would be .9992 or 99.92%. However, the weather gods decided to interfere. The 10 day outlook indicated a period of temperatures hovering in the single digits or teens so I decided to take a chance and reassemble the car. So far, I'm up to 33 consecutive successful first time starts which works out to a 99.99% probability that I corrected the problem.

Of course, Murphy doesn't believe in probabilities and now that I'm posting this, he will call up the fault out of spite so keep your fingers crossed that he doesn't see this.

Outstanding!!
Although, considering who you are, I'm not too surprised..
It's fixed. I have the faith!!

 

[epanzella]

disregard

 

[RJSakowski]

I have had trucks on and off for 45 years. The biggest problem with a pickup for me was security for a larger load. I saw the minivan as a good compromise. My first minivan was a Plymouth Grand Voyager because was impressed with it's towing capability.

I get decent mileage with my minivan but can carry a good load if I have to. It is a comfortable ride and when we take our older friends out to dinner, they can easily enter and exit. More so than my wife's Mazda. If I was to get a second vehicle, I'm partial to Lamborghini. but then reason takes over.