williaty

Yeah in America, this is an unusual idea. There rest of the world tows with the small FWD cars all the time and wonders why we're so weird.

The nail in the coffin was the BCM and associated fuse panel/wiring harness going out. Additionally, it needed the mid-level roller arm replaced on both sliding doors, a major leak of the rear doors fixed, the parking brake cable assembly needed replaced (which requires removing a huge amount of stuff to get to), the rear glass sprayer hose blew up inside the rear unibody so it'd flood the car if you used it, and the AC was leaking. Most of the stuff was ignoring, but when the BCM went, that forced the issue since it was undrivable. The big issue is just how shockingly little the 2014 was worth. It didn't take a lot of repair bills to exceed the value of the van according to KBB. Also: Ford really did a shit job choosing the ratios for the new 8F35 transmission in the 2.0L vans, so it is MUCH, MUCH WORSE at towing than the older 2.5L vans with the 6F35

My '14 just ruined my vacation by breaking down and the repair would be more than the van is worth. I'm looking at replacing it with one of the last remaining '23s I can find in the state but the engine is concerning me. In my '14, the 2.5L REALLY struggled pulling our camper up mountains in West Virginia and you can forget about keeping up with traffic on the interstate. The new 2.0L engine is the same power but less torque. They could have made up for the reduced torque by using shorter gearing to take advantage of the power. However, I fear what they actually did is to make the gearing taller to maximize fuel economy to meet their CAFE targets. Has anyone driven both the 2.5L and the new 2.0L while towing or otherwise heavily loaded so I can get an opinion on which engine is better at it?

Yes, it still is. I've spent a lot of time fiddling with it, waiting for it to rain again, etc. Aaaand I think I've been chasing the wrong thing the whole time. I found a leak at the top of the doors with a garden hose but I think it's a red herring. While it can leak there, as the hose shows, I don't think in reality that it does. I found another leak where the water running around the vertical sides of the door frame (over towards where the hinges are) is somehow is making it's way between the chassis-side seal and the chassis itself. So I now think that maybe it's not dripping water from the top, it's slowly flooding water up from the bottom. I need to get into the service manual (which is a MESS and hard to use!) and try to find the install procedure for this seal to see if it's supposed to be glued to the chassis or just friction fit. Then I need to redo it.

Hey that was a massive wall of text with absolutely no formatting that I can't even begin to read. Can you try that again, using punctuation to split it up into sentences and breaking it up into paragraphs so I can actually read what you want to tell us?

Yeah it's not like a crazy full-body windup to get it to latch, just more push than you'd normally use to shut the door quietly/politely.

I moved the left side upper latch plate inwards the maximum it can move (about 1mm). No change still leaks, still doesn't reliably latch the bottom latch unless you slam it.

Yes, I can put a hose on the roof and watch exactly where it's flowing into the van. No damage to the doors. Doors have good panel gaps but the left-side door (the only with the leak at the top) can fail to latch on the bottom of the door (top always latches) unless you slam it. I am not sure what to think about aftermarket parts in the Ford world. I've gotten some truly junk parts, like endlinks that lasted only 9 months, when I haven't bought OEM. OTOH, Ford OEM parts prices are insane. So if there's a 3rd party that meets or exceeds the sealing and durability of OEM, I'm open to it. The Subaru world was much better about parts!

My 2014 has the barn doors. I'm getting a massive leak through the rear doors when it rains. The leak comes from the top of the left side door where the vertical weatherstrip on the edge of the door is supposed to seal against the ring of weatherstripping that runs all the way around the entire rear opening. For whatever reason, it lets water through in a torrent right at where the edge of the vertical piece stops. I'm assuming either the vertical seal or the ring seal has gotten old and hard and isn't squishy enough anymore but it costs $350 to fire the parts shotgun and just replace the seals without being sure what the actual problem is. Has anyone else dealt with this? Has anyone successfully fixed the leak? If so, how?

Doable but not as easy as you think. The loadfloor in the wagon and van versions are different. When you remove the 2nd row seats from the wagon version, you'll find that the carpet is not supported underneath where the seats were. If you don't realize that and step into that space, you'll crush everything below it. Yeah, found that out by doing it. I build a plywood box-ish thing to infill from where the loadfloor drops off (behind the 2nd row seats) to the back of the 1st row seats so I have a flat floor all the way from the rear doors to the back of the 1st row.

I need to buy a tap to clean out the hole on a rusty knuckle and I lost my damned note where I had written it down. Does anyone know the thread diameter and pitch for the bolt that pinches the knuckle onto the bottom of the strut? It's the teal one marked HB1 in the attached picture

Buy all the parts to build up the struts and then do a swap. You should replace the upper spring perches and strut mounts every time you change the dampers anyway. The plastic/rubber bits probably aren't required but, given the state mine were in at 75k miles when I had to replace the dampers, I don't see them surviving until 150k miles either. The springs are the only significant cost item where the replacement isn't necessary. I bought new everything, built up struts before I tore the car apart, then swapped struts, then tore down my worn out struts to save the springs and a few bits for next time I need to replace the dampers.

Did either of you actually get the Bilsteins installed on your TC? If so, which ones and what do you think of them?

I've seen a couple of you guys talk about your tranny temperature. How are you guys reading it? The Launch scan tool that I have from when I had my business won't pull it up. Will a Scangauge? Ideally, I'd like something that I can have on the dash full-time while I'm towing, not a laptop-based solution.

For a long time, I've been ending up with water in the back of the van. Based on reading here, I thought it was from the 3rd brake light but when I caulked that properly the water kept showing up. Then I thought it might be coming up through the floor where the bolts for the 3rd row seats and seatbelts bolt in but after caulking all of those shut I still had water. Eventually, I caught it at just the right time and realized it was filling the divot in the floor where the left side barn door latches and then driving was slinging the water all around the back under the carpet. So I locked my wife in the back and started hosing down the rear door seals. There's a MASSIVE leak where the left side barn door's seal presses onto the chassis-side seal that runs all the way around the opening. I think what's happening is that the chassis-side seal isn't conforming well enough to the door-side seal and there's a small gap forming just beside the door-side seal. Has anyone heard of this leak before? Has anyone fixed this leak before? Any words of wisdom?

That is a very ugly looking.... thing.... The 1st gen TCs weren't good looking but that had a particular goofyness that was appealing because you could see that they were meant to only ever be driven flat out by an angry man with an aluminum clipboard, preferably on two wheels. The 2nd gen TC wasn't anything one way or the other, it was just any random boxy minivan. This... thing.. has been hit with the ugly stick.

We had them laser cut out of titanium. I don't remember which alloy/grade. Ti has really shitty thermal conductivity for a metal, so placing the tiny shim between the rotor and the hub acted like a tiny little insulator, keeping the hub cooler.

Don's helping me with the smaller ones but if anyone has a lead on the ones for 10-gauge wire, let me know.

Anyone have a line on someplace that can source these terminals right now or have some they're willing to sell? All the usual suspects are out of stock and listing as much as a 21 week delay for restocking.

So there was great advice in this thread about how to find the correct IPC on lkqonline. Anyone know how to find a 2014 steering wheel with the audio controls on the right side spoke? It's like lkqonline doesn't think steering wheels exist.

I owned a Subaru shop for a decade and one of the big things I learned is that Subaru knuckles are almost always destroyed by a failed wheel bearing even if you can't see the problem. If you have to replace a wheel bearing and don't replace the knuckle too, you're going to be replacing the bearing again in about 10k miles. Are the Connects like that too? I've finally taken enough of the van apart to determine that, at the very least, I have a failed right front wheel bearing. Sadly, it got driven around on for a while before I tore it apart. Do I need to order a knuckle too or are Fords generally good to go with just a hub and bearing for the swap?

FWIW, Don is right. The hitches aren't rated for jacking up the vehicle. You may get away with it once... twice... or not at all. How do I know? Members of my family that are first responders have pulled bodies (yes, more than once) out from under cars where the they were being lifted by a hitch, the hitch or unibody failed, and the guy working on his car was crushed to death. Having installed the hitch on my van myself, I will definitely say that the OEM hitch design is particularly likely to fail if abused in this manner.

USDM 2014 Connect wagon XLT. Early this spring, I swapped my summer tires onto the van. The only thing I did while I had the van on the lift was to change to summer tires. When the van got back on its feet, it was making a growling noise like it had mud tires on. OK, I just swapped tires, it sounds like mud tires, so it has to be tire noise, right? After driving it around sadly for a month or two, I thought maaaaaybe I could hear the gronch-gronch-gronch sound of a bad wheel bearing buried under all the tire noise so I stopped driving the van until the weather cooled down enough to make me willing to work on it. I bought a new set of summer tires in order to get rid of the tire noise so that I could hear if there was a bearing noise hidden in there. So I just swapped a new set of summer tires onto it and the noise is still there, growling away like a set of mudders. OK, fine, this model of tire must just be crap now. So I change to my winter tires today. Same damned noise! The noise sounds just like bad/rough/mud tires, is related to vehicle speed, and is worst around 46-50mph. It's very constant, doesn't change character, and sounds like it's centered left to right and comes from the front end. The only other thing I can offer is that I put it back on the lift and ran it in gear without the wheels on it today. The left side axle has some sort of an abnormality where it enters the transmission. Once per revolution, there's a light clank and the inner CV joint's cup jumps sideways about a 1/8th of an inch. No growling, grinding, or anything else is heard running the van on the lift. So what do you guys think? Wheel bearing? Bad axle? Bad carrier bearing? Bad tranny?

I used to own a shop that specialized in working on Subarus. By the time you know a Subaru wheel bearing is bad, it's already destroyed the knuckle. If you don't replace the knuckle along with the bearing and hub, you'll get 10-20k out of the new bearing before it fails again. Replace it all and you'll get 80-100k out of it before it fails. Customers always seemed baffled that they could come to me and suddenly their car would stop needing wheel bearings twice a year after trying multiple times at other shops that were trying to do the work as cheaply as possible. If I can't find a preassembled kit, I'll just buy the parts and pre-assemble it myself in the air conditioning!

For the older Connects, Moog makes a complete bolt-on assembly that's the front hub, bearing, knuckle, and ball joint already put together. However, I can't find one for my 2014. I've got to replace a bad front wheel bearing and in this god-awful heat I'd rather push the easy button and just swap a whole assembly on and be done with it. Anyone know where I can buy one?