jrm223

Windguy got the pics up already, so I won't put more here. But, if you go to my profile and then Albums, there's pics from when I took out my floor the first time & some of the pics have a measuring tape showing depths and such. I will say that if you don't care about having the plastic steps by the sliding doors, you can just squeak a 60" wide chest toolbox on top of those brackets in Windguy's first pic (the silver brackets at bottom of pic, the plastic steps normally mount to them). Right now I have a 48" chest in that spot and it's too narrow, but I have a 60" that I'm still cleaning grease and crud out of because the guy I bought both boxes from is a diesel mechanic. When the 60" is ready, the 48" may go by the back barn doors, instead. I'll have to get a pic of the setup soon, supposed to be decent temps here in a couple days so I can get the extra junk out of the van.

On the 2nd gen, AC is standard, but power locks/windows are "Optional", but pretty much every dealer around specs their lot orders with power L/W since everyone expects them these days. Like Fifty150 said, you'll want the LWB for the extra length to work with, but the lower roof is not-so-great on G2, so there's tradeoffs. You'll have the footwell behind the front seats to work with, though - you might be short enough to stand fairly comfortably there even with the lower roof. I'm 6ft tall, so I still have to hunch over when standing in that well. If you get a cargo van, take out the false floor to be able to use the deeper well; reports are that some/most 2014's are welded in, but all 2015+ are just bolted in. The length of floor in LWB behind the front seats is right around 7ft or so, near floor level.

That looks to only affect the passenger wagons in Europe, not the cargo vans. Ford is doing essentially the same thing here in the states, stopping car production by 2022 except for Mustang & the new Focus Active (I think that was the name of it, some crossover thing that just recently came out & looks similar to Subaru Outback). All we'll have here is 'Stang, trucks, SUV's and CUV/crossovers because passenger car sales are abysmal.

This is the first I've heard of terrible wear on the Conti tires. I swapped mine out at 73K miles and they were still somewhere around 1/16+" above the wear bars at that point. I'll have to look again when I get home from work tonight. Since they still have a glimmer of life, those tires are still sitting in my garage at home, because the tire shop gave them back to me for "just in case" spares when I had the General Grabbers put on.

OEM tires are Continentals, at least on my 2015. My van wheelspins easily ever since new, completely empty (no heavy load), flat dry pavement or wet and still even with the 215/65R16 General Grabber AT2's that I had put on about 10-15K miles ago. These just have a lot of torque off a stop, so you need to keep real light on the skinny pedal, haha.

I was trying to figure out how to get that off, but didn't want to break it. I reckon that will probably require the panel trim tools to safely remove it, yea? For right now, the wire comes out just ahead of that triangle, goes around the outside and then back into the door opening - ghetto as all get out, but I didn't want to chance breaking that piece of triangle plastic. But at least my van and the wire are both black (who knows why Curt would send black for the positive power, although it uses a white ground - which is house wiring color scheme, white neutral).

There's nothing back there except fuel inertia cut-off and taillight wiring, as shown here. Fifty150, the taillight converter has a ground ring terminal attached for a screw-to-body ground, so I temporarily put that on one of the hinge support bolts - in the pic above, they're on the right side D-pillar, but of course I used a driver-side bolt where the converter is. I ran a temporary power wire off the underhood fuse box on Saturday because I was expecting to be bringing a trailer home yesterday, but the tires on it ended up being real bad so first I need to get some tires this week, lol. The lights do work fine, though, I towed the trailer 3-4 miles to another buddies house. I did buy another ball hitch and set it up in the raised position and I can use that other drop ball on my F350 when I get it on the road.

Well, I see you did finally get the hitch off. But, I'll still post this pic from the other thread that someone mentioned (where a guy added the Ford hitch to his non-equipped TC wagon), just in case anybody else needs to remove the factory hitch for any reason in the future. Underneath the van, directly ahead of the rear bolts, will be one of these on each side. This is the same hole that the Curt and other aftermarket hitches use to fish-wire bolts for the forward mount points (the empty hole in pic). For those who mentioned running the Ford & aftermarket hitch to strengthen a hitch platform, the Ford one would need to be removed so the aftermarket can be installed, then put the Ford one back into place.

For what it's worth, I can provide these pictures of my 2015 TC LWB cargo model. As you can clearly see, there's no fuse panel and no extra harnesses that would plug into a trailer module. I'm not really sure what the module is on the passenger side by the sliding door, probably an inertia fuel cut-off in case of serious accident? I never have paid much attention to it.

I finally got my van 'hitched' yesterday, woo hoo! Took me 20 minutes to install by myself. Still need to run power wire for the Curt 56218 trailer light adapter, though. My van doesn't have the rear power fuse panel, so I have extra work required to get power to the module. And talk about low, I'll need to flip that ball to get a decent height. I'm used to knee-busters on my past trucks, but this one is an ankle-buster! Never mind the dirtiness, I live in rural ranch country in a town with gravel roads. I can clean it in my yard, leave it out to dry and it'll be dirty again an hour later without any driving... So I just hose/rinse it off every so often.

I don't know what Ford models y'all have across the pond, but here in the US the steering wheel is compatible between Focus, Edge, Escape, TC, and probably some other models.

From Blackstone themselves - "We always recommend using an oil grade recommended for your engine by the manufacturer and a brand that fits your budget. But beyond that, we find that brand makes very little difference. If there were an oil that consistently out-performed the rest of them, we’d have no reason to keep that information secret, but we just haven’t found that oil yet. ... One of the best-kept secrets of the oil industry is that these store brands are actually the same, quality oils that are produced by the major oil companies." https://www.blackstone-labs.com/which-oil-to-use/ On a somewhat related note, I rolled 92K yesterday, so I'm getting close to knocking down that 100K in my van, lol. Only big issue I've had is the ambient air temperature sensor, I had to get that replaced in 2016, somewhere around the 30K mile mark or so.

There's somebody in the forum here that has the Fiberine top, I can't remember their name now. As I recall, it was around 12" or so, instead of the 22" model. Come to think of it, when I last looked at the Fiberine website, I think they only showed 22" available for the TC1, not the TC2 (2014+).

Digital gauges are generally always suspect, they should only be used as a rough guide. The only way to know your true mileage is dividing miles traveled by the gallons put into the tank to fill back up. I have larger-than-stock all-terrain tires and I'm averaging 23-24 MPG hand-calculated (including correcting the indicated miles on the tripmeter to adjust for the tire size; in my case, multiply the tripmeter by 1.059 and then divide by gallons of gas). My van is an XL, though, so it doesn't have the fancy MPG display and such, haha.

I didn't get a pic of it, but I saw a gas station in Oklahoma (I think? Or maybe it was Missouri) that already has an E15 option, lol. Here's a pic of my MPG from the trip up north & back. Note that the mileage is corrected because I'm running 215/65R16 tires, GPS shows that the dash is off by 5.9%; total trip just under 2135 miles.

I'm not sure what you mean there - the stock seat replaces that false floor the vans have, shown in windguy's pics. You would remove the van false floor, stick it in your garage or shed and install the wagon (passenger van) second seat, which then folds flat into the cavity that is covered by the false floor in cargo vans - essentially, the folded seat becomes the false floor. But, if you need two rows of seating in the back (total three rows if you include driver/front passenger), then others have said the LWB third-row is bolt-in rather than quick-latch.

Dang, I was paying so much attention to the connector, that I didn't bother looking at the bulb. We'll see how it works out when they get here. I actually have thought of using Abrams dual-color bulbs since they have a steady-burn wire on them. But, I had tried them on one of my F350's (just taped into the stock bulb opening) and found that the steady-burn lights up both colors at once and my Abrams are amber/blue bulbs. Ended up putting "normal" white/amber (W parking, A signal) switching bulbs and then drilled the F350 housings for the Abrams to run separately. Sounds like I may need to just use the resistors from them; the wiring harnesses on our TC2 taillights is only like $25/ea on Ebay, so they're not expensive to replace if needed. About the yellow bulbs that I put up front, they're working great so far. At night, they light up everything around them (ground, vehicles ahead of me) because they're pretty bright.

I was just looking around at what's currently available on Amazon and ordered this pair - it's amber with an inline resistor & includes white LED chips with the white being on a separate power wire, so I'm fixin' to hook those up to the reverse lights. So with these new ones, putting the van in reverse will turn on the regular reverse lights AND also activate the rear turn signal housings with white light for extra brightness. I also spent time looking to see if there were any dual-filament 921/W16W-compatible bulbs & sockets, but could not find any - if there was, that would allow me to make the entire clear part of the tail lights light up amber for turns and white for reverse. When these new bulbs come, the whole clear section will light up white for reverse and just the normal turn signal will light up amber. I came across this bulb reference guide awhile back (I think from a digital copy of the owners manual, maybe?) and figured I ought to put it in here for anybody wanting quick info on the various bulbs our Gen-2 vans use and, more importantly in this discussion, it shows the wattage used by each bulb. It's crazy that the little front bulb is 24W and the larger rear bulb is 21W - but, the new amber/white rear ones I ordered have 50W resistors plus the resistance of the bulbs themselves, so it ought to cure my hyper-flash finally. WY21W is aka 7440, W16W is aka 921, W21/5W is aka 7443, W5W is aka T10/194, etc.

Well, I just got the front LED turn bulbs like 10 minutes ago, ordered on Nov 2nd. I ended up putting the driver side in first and it was no problem, then the passenger side was being a PITA just like when I originally tried to put in the barrel LED bulbs that I commented about yesterday. Turns out that I had the holder clocked about 90* out-of-phase and just had to turn it to the right position, lol. That said, maybe the amber barrel LED's actually would fit just fine, but they're at home now & I kinda destroyed the one I tried to put in last time, anyway... When I had tried to put it in, the holder is what was getting hung-up, not the bulb itself - because I was trying to put it in the same position as today, oops. Here's the pics, since they're worth 1000 words, etc etc. Oh yea, the base of the LED bulb has a small notch that lines up with a tab inside the holder, so you can't really put these ones in backwards. They also have a set-screw so that you can turn the LED half if it's not aiming at 3/9-o'clock positions when you install in the housing, but mine were already perfect when I just put them in.

I already have hyper-flash from the rear turn signals, haven't got around to buying resistors for them. Since it's impossible to use in-line resistors on the front, I'm thinking I should eventually order a pair for the back that is enough to fix front & rear together. I can't imagine that the front bulbs use all that much amperage, so it shouldn't take a whole lot of resistance on the back to 'balance' the load to above hyper-flash levels. For the low beams, I'm running these white & yellow switchback bulbs and love them. When I first turn on the lights, they're white - I can shut them off for a second and turn back on, they switch to yellow. Then repeat to switchback to white, again. Most people would just run yellow in the fog lights, but I have an XL without fogs and I prefer running yellow headlights when needed. So when I found these bulbs, I was like "hell yeah, best of both worlds!!" haha. Here's a video of them operating from another purchaser on Amazon I still need to switch the high beam bulbs to LED, but I'll probably just go with straight white bulbs for that.

Fifty, I have these LED bulbs (PWY24W for front) from Amazon on their way in a slow boat from China, haha. Whenever they eventually get here, I'll let you know how well they work out. I originally bought these other LED bulbs, but they didn't fit all the way into the lamp housing, so don't bother with them. Amazon will say that PWY24W doesn't fit the TC2, but when you look at the bulbs they list as fitting, they're all for the rear turn signals (7440/7443) instead of the front - so you'll basically just have to figure out on your own what truly fits the front. Tully, that's a pretty sweet setup y'all have in that van!

If you're worried about tires slipping off the line, I don't think you'll ever want a TC2, haha. Mine has constantly spun the tires since the day I bought it brand new - and I don't do it on purpose. The 2.5L & 6 speed has more than enough torque off the line to spin brand new tires on dry pavement.

I can't stand that E15 BS, either. We're exporting over half of our oil and then importing from other countries, WTF sense does that make?! Oh wait, government never makes logical sense! Anyway, we have E10 here and I've seen rare stations that have options for straight-gas at like 30+ cents higher per gallon... I've spot-checked previous trips to be around 25.5-26.5 MPG at usually 70 MPH with occasional jaunts to 75 MPH when the speed limit allows. Mileage is kind of crap at those speeds already, so I really don't drive over the limit much, lol. I'll have to see if I can find my little fuel book and record the numbers better on this next trip, but up north may already have winter fuel since they're in the 30's already.

My next trip up north to visit family starts in 1.5 weeks, so I just finally ordered a cruise control steering wheel off Ebay. Brand new, cruise & menu buttons (obviously menu will be useless on my XL) for $120 because I used the "make offer" button instead of paying their $135 asking price. For anybody that might want to try swapping a wheel that also has radio buttons on it, there's a used leather one listed for $153 BIN with 1.5 days left on the auction. I wanted to buy that one, but I need to minimize my spending because of the upcoming trip. Here's the leather wheel with cruise, menu & radio buttons My trips up there are about 1000 miles each way and I drive straight-through & alone, so finally having cruise control in the van will be a very welcome upgrade!

Unfortunately I don't even remember now, that was back in the spring and I stopped keeping track of my mileage after I moved to Texas. When I lived in IL, I averaged 26-28 MPG and moving to Texas dropped it to 23-24 MPG because of higher speed limits. Maybe I'll have to do it again sometime - with the gas can IN the van, haha.