Fan Clutch Replacement Tips: Ford 6.0L Powerstroke

How to replace the fan clutch on a 6.0L Ford Powerstroke diesel engine. Never use an air chisel to break the fan clutch loose. This damages the unit as well as the water pump bearing.
 
Transcript
Let’s take a look at what it takes to replace the fan clutch on this ’03 Ford truck with a six liter power stroke diesel engine. Now, yes, it looks quite convoluted in here. Not a lot of room. We’re going to go ahead and remove this inner shroud. I’ve already removed the clips. So that’s kind of out of the way. I’m gonna go ahead and go underneath the truck. There’s, uh, a drain valve on the radiator itself, to drain the coolant down, gonna remove the upper radiator hose. Also the overflow or the, the hose going into the day gas bottle. Then there’s two bolts holding this upper shroud piece in place. We’re gonna to get that out of the way. That’s really an open things up. And we’re also going to, at the same time, remove our electrical connector for this fan clutch here.

Now this engine, uses this electoral viscous fan clutch. It means that there’s a speed sensor in here. There’s also an actuator to cause the fan to engage and disengage based on stuff like engine oil, temperature, engine, coolant, temperature, even vehicle speed. If the vehicle is going 70 miles an hour down the expressway, the fan certainly doesn’t typically have to be turned on. And so it’s going to monitor all that stuff and turn the fan on and off. So let’s get started.

I’m gonna start removing the parts here and get down to the actual fan clutch. Okay. Now you can see we’ve got the shroud assembly up out of here. We’ve made a little bit of room here and unplugged the electrical connector for the fan. And we kind of got that out of the housing here. It’s very important. When we put our new one in, we want to lock that in place. Otherwise those wires could get tangled up in our fan. Now I’m going to take a hob holding tool and a wrench to get on the fan clutch itself. I’m going to hold the pulley in place and spin this off there. Now we’re going to do that by coming in from the side here, it’s very difficult to show on camera, but that’s the way we’re gonna approach it. Once that’s hubs spins off the pulley, we’ll be able to remove the entire assembly up here out of the radiator area. Well, we’ve used our tools to break this loose. Now I’m going to hold the wire harness on this old one here. I’m just going to spin this fan assembly off of the hub.

Now it started on there. Pretty good. And it’s got fine threads, but you can see once we get it loose, I can pick it up out of here and find the little opening right there. You got to pull the radiator back. Remember it is still tight fit here, but we’ll get this up out of here. Now there’s a couple of bolts here holding the fan assembly to our clutch. We’re gonna remove these and re-torque them properly and transfer this over to new hub. Before we do that, we want to carefully inspect this. Make sure that there’s no cracks. This one actually looks pretty good here. And so we’re ready to re-install it.

All right. We’ve got our new fan clutch here. Remove the fan blade from the old unit. Before I install them in here, use a little bit of a threadlocker blue on these. We’re going to put them in. I’ll work my way around, and then we’re going to torque all of these to 30 foot pounds. Work our way around, make sure they’re good and snug. We don’t need to over-tighten them, but let’s torque them properly. 30 foot pounds. Now we’re ready to re-install our unit back on the truck.

We’ve transferred the fan blade over to our new clutch. We’ve got to thread it on the water pump here. And so we can spin it around till it snugs up. Make sure it continues to spin nice and freely. If you have to fight it well, it’s probably a sign that we’ve got messed up threads on the water pump or on the fan clutch itself. So it’s a good idea to inspect them before we even get to this point. But as you can see, it’s spinning quite freely right now. And so we’re going to continue to slide it on there until it bottoms out. Then we’ll grab our tools and we’ll tighten it up again. Now this particular fan is just good, old fashioned righty tighty, lefty loosey. Some other models are going to have a reverse thread, in which that will give you a warning typically, but be aware of that.

One other thing we want to pay special attention to is to get this wire harness locked into place properly in the fan shroud here. So you’ll see it’s locked in now. Now I’m not so concerned about those wires rubbing on the fan. Once we get this all assembled and, uh, back together, we’re gonna make our electrical connection finish assembling the shroud here, hook the hoses up, put our air cleaner back in place, bleed the cooling system properly, clear any trouble codes that may have been set, and retest the system. Make sure our cooling fan is operating properly. There’s some installation tips on this thing. I make sure the threads are good and clean. Make sure that you connect this again. And while you’re in there, you know, might not be a bad time to replace the water pump belt, tensioner belt, some of these other associated components there. Hopefully now you understand what’s involved with replacing the fan clutch on a six liter power stroke engine.