Dont Get Overcharged for These Quick Fixes 1999-2007 Ford Super Duty F-250 Truck

Hey, friends, it's Len here from 1A Auto. In today's video, I want to talk to you about some quick, easy fixes that you can do that's going to save you a ton of money on this '99 through 2007 Ford F-250. Let's get started.

Firstly, let's talk about replacing these wiper blades. Now your wiper blades are going to be very important, so you can see out your windshield obviously in inclement weather. To remove these, you just go ahead and slide them right off like that and then you can replace it with something brand new. This one's in very poor condition, it has to be replaced. To put it back on, you just slide it on, give it a nice little click, and then rest it against the windshield.

Now, let's get under the hood. The next thing I'm going to talk about is something very basic, and that's your air filter. If you were to come right along here, lift up on this, you can go ahead and grab onto here and separate the two pieces. After that, remove your air filter and inspect it. If it looks like it's dirty like this one, you're going to have to replace it. Now, assuming you have an air filter that's nice and clean, go ahead and slide it right in here so it's completely secured. We're going to line this back up with where it needs to go, and then this clamp needs to go around both these edges right here. So if you look at the two pieces, you can see it has an edge. Just line it up and then tighten up the clamp, latch it in, give it a nice wiggle. You want to ensure that this is latched. If it's not, it could get dirty air getting sucked up into your engine and, of course, that's going to be very bad.

Next, let's talk about your serpentine belt. That's going to be the belt that runs across the front of your engine, going across all these pulleys. There's going to be some very important parts that it goes across. You have your alternator, you're also going to have your power steering pump down along the left-hand side here, you have your water pump, and then, of course, over on the other side, you're going to have your AC compressor. All these need to be powered by your serpentine belt. So, of course, if the serpentine belt is in poor condition, you're going to have an issue. Let's take a look at it. When you look at it, if you see any cracks that look like that, that's going to be an indication that there's going to be an issue. Typically, if you see a little bit of a crack, that's not too bad, but if you see a whole bunch of cracks going everywhere along the belt, that means that it's in very poor condition and it needs to be replaced.

Something else that's important to mention about the belt is the tensioner. If I was to go ahead and grab onto this, I can see down along there, you have a tensioner. That's going to be spring-loaded. If I try to pull on the belt and there's no movement and I can't move it at all, well, that's telling me that the tensioner is no good. And that's going to be putting a lot of pressure on all those pulleys and you're probably going to end up doing some engine damage. If we were going to be talking about replacing the serpentine belt, it's going to be fairly easy. You just want to make sure that you take note of the routing of the belt. Essentially what I mean by that is it goes over this pulley, but under that one, goes over another one and under another. So just pay attention to that. If you need to draw a picture, do that, or, of course, you can look along the driver side right here, and there's a nice sticker that shows you the way it needs to go.

Now to relieve tension from that, you're going to go right to this tensioner. You can grab onto that with a 3/8 ratchet and then relieve tension from it. After that, take the belt off of the pulleys and inspect it. When you have your new belt, just match them up next to each other. If they're not the same size, you don't have the right belt. If they are the same, then just go ahead and put it on there in the same routing as you removed the original one from.

So now we're going to talk about a PCV valve. That's going to be a very important aspect to your emission system of your truck. If you come along your passenger side valve cover right here, you can grab onto this hose, give it a nice wiggle and break it free. This right here is your PCV valve. After that, you can just go ahead and remove it, just like this, and then you just want to grab a new one and reinstall it the same way that you removed it. Now let's talk about headlight bulbs. Maybe you have one of them out and you want to try to replace it. It's something that's going to be fairly easy to do, but if you ask somebody else to do it, they're probably going to charge you maybe half an hour labor. All you really have to do is get in between the battery area here and then slide your hand down to this area. I have the battery removed only because I want you to be able to see what's going on. Once I grab onto this, I'm just going to turn it counterclockwise, and then I can remove the bulb from the assembly.

Now, once this is out, what you're going to need to do is get underneath the tab right here. You can do that with a pick or anything you might happen to have. Once you do that, just go ahead and do this, wiggle it , and separate the two. After that, just go ahead and look at the number along the side here, find two of them, and then replace the pair. Once you've done all of that, let's continue on by putting it back together. Just slide this back together like this, put this in so it clicks, give it a nice wiggle, you want to ensure that it's connected and then we'll put it back in there. Whenever you're replacing your headlight bulbs, you always want to be careful not to touch the glass with your fingers. If you have oils on your skin, that could potentially burn out the bulb prematurely.

Once it's clipped in, go ahead and replace the other one and then test them. Now, before we slide underneath this truck, there's something else that I want to talk to you about. Look at this tire. There's a couple of things that I wanted to address. First of all, look at how it's sagging like this right here. You can tell that this tire is underinflated. To inflate it, you just come right here, remove this cap and then this is going to be where you're going to add your air. If you're wondering how much air to add, don't necessarily look at the tire because that's the maximum pressure for this particular tire. You want to look inside the driver door jam, and that's going to tell you the specific tire pressure for this truck. This might seem like it's something that's very basic and everybody knows it, but maybe not everybody thinks about it. If you happen to be driving in your truck and you feel as though it's pulling to one side or even you feel as though you have a little stability when you're going around a corner, more than likely it's due to having a low tire like this and it's something that needs to be addressed.

Aside from that, we're going to move along to talking about this aspect of it. Just running my hands along the tread, I can feel a lot of high and a lot of low areas on this. That's called chopping when you see it flaking up like this. If you see a tire that looks like that, that means that it needs to be rotated. When I talk about rotating your tires, I don't just mean driving it down the road because they're going to be rotating like this, I'm talking about you need to switch their positions on the truck. To rotate the tires, what you're going to need to do is jack up the truck. You're going to put jack stands directly under the frame so all four wheels are up off the ground.

After that, you're going to take your front tires and cross them to the rear. Take those rear tires and bring them straight forward to the front, and when you torque your wheels, you're going to torque them between 150 foot-pounds and 165 foot-pounds. Now, let's get under the truck. Of course, your truck has four-wheel drive, so let's talk about the gearboxes, starting with the transfer case. This is going to be something that's going to be very easy to service.

You have your fill plug right here, that's the first thing that you have to remove. If that doesn't come out, don't even bother removing the drain plug. After that's out, go ahead and remove the drain plug, let this all drain out. Once it's all drained out, put back in your drain plug with a little bit of thread sealer around it, and then fill up your transfer case right here. You only want to fill it till you get a small trickle of fluid coming out of here. You don't necessarily need to keep filling, filling, filling, and then worrying about it coming all the way up to the top. That's not what you need to do. You just want to have a small trickle coming out and then you put this back in as well.

Now, your truck being four-wheel drive, not only does it have a transfer case, but it also has a rear differential and a front differential all the way in the front. We're going to talk about the rear differential. If you look along here, you can see the rear differential pan. A lot of times you're going to end up seeing a leak along the seal right here. If that's the case, it's going to be something that you're going to want to take care of because if you lose your lubrication inside here, you're going to have differential problems.

Once again, the first thing that you want to do is check your fill plug. Your fill plug's going to be located right here on your rear differential. That's something that you're going to have to remove before you go ahead and remove this cover. After you have the fill plug out, you can continue on by cleaning down this area. We're going to remove all of our mounting bolts and then we're going to remove this cover. Clean up the entire area inside there, of course, clean up the pan, you want it to look as good as possible. Look at those bolts, if they look like they're damaged or worn in any way, you need to replace them. After everything's nice and clean and the bolts are good, you want to make sure that you replace the gasket that's in between the pan and the differential itself, put it all back together, and then you're going to come over here to the fill and fill it up with the proper fluid.

As you fill it up, what you want to happen is just have a teeny bit of fluid that comes running out of here. Once again, you don't need to fill it all the way up to the top and fluid coming pouring out of here. You just want enough fluid in there so it comes trickling out. After that, put your plug back in there and then take it for a road test. Something that's going to be very common is you might happen to notice you have a plate light out on these. If that's the case, just come underneath your rear bumper, come right up along here, grab onto this, turn it counterclockwise, and then remove it.

Now you just grab your bolt, you can wiggle it and pull it right out of there, you'd replace this with a 194 bulb. But also while you have it out, take a peek in there. A lot of times you're going to find some green crusties. If you do, that's corrosion and that needs to be dealt with. Typically, you can just go ahead and replace this unit by trimming these wires and putting on a new pigtail. Assuming this looks good, go ahead and take your new bulb, slide it in there, and then put it back up and in.

Okay, friends, so that's my short list of quick and easy fixes to help save you some money on your Ford F-250. Maybe you have some quick fixes that's going to help other people save some money on fixing up their truck like this. If you do, and you want to talk about it, leave it in the comment section below because I always look to hear from you. If you like the video, smash on the like button for me, it would mean the world. While you're at it, go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell. That way there, you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.