2015 Lincoln Navigator Front Engine Cooling Fan Assembly TRQ RFA84444

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today we're working on a 2011 Ford F150 EcoBoost. We're going to be replacing the cooling fans. Be a fairly easy job. I want to be the guy that shows you how to do it. If you need this part, or any other part, you could always check us out at 1aauto.com.

Okay, so first what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to get this up and out of our way a little bit. So there's a clip right here. Just going to take my small screwdriver, give it a little twist, lift up on my box. I'm going to hold it up. I'm going to come over to this clip right here. Give it a little twist, continue to lift. I'm going to come over here. See if I can get it to lift. And then this one. There we are. It's floating around pretty easy now.

So now we can get a better look at what's going on. See what else is holding this down. Looks like right here. This should be able to just pull right up. Let's see. Might need to grab my fork tool, but essentially this little plastic thing right here just slides down onto that stud. So all I want to do is try to get the plastic to come up from that stud. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to get it with this little screwdriver. There we are. Okay? See the stud? There's our little plastic thing, just slides down on there. We're going to need to take this off of here and put it on our new one but we'll wait, okay?

Let's see what else we're looking at as we come along. And up and over. Let's see what we're looking at on this side. So on this side I've got a little clip right here. This just pushes in. So all I'm going to do is try to get it out. So I'm going to put my screwdriver kind of like this. There we are. What else are we looking at? We got another one up here. This one looks like it's a little bit more fragile, so I'm going to grab another tool and I'm going to try to do it the right way for you on camera without breaking it hopefully.

So I got a little forky tool. I'm going to try this. If this doesn't work I'll resort to my next trick. There we are. Great job forky tool. Okay. So we're getting this up a little bit. We're going to look and see what else is holding this up. There's wiring that comes down here, that leads down to the fans, the fan motors, okay?

So we're going to need to disconnect those. We've also got this wire right here. This leads to the... looks like mass air flow sensor. So we're going to either have to unscrew that there, or just disconnect it here. If we were replacing this or cleaning it, we would unscrew it and go that way, but since we're not, all we're going to do is just squeeze this little tab right here. Pull it off. We'll take a look inside, make sure it's not corroded. We'll set it aside, whichever way you want to put it.

And then we're going to have to take a look down at the fan motors, the connectors... I'll slide my ladder. I'm going to grab my little screwdriver again, one of my most handy tools. Right in the center there should be a little push. See if I can't find it. It's hard to see it. Okay. Can see that one okay.

So I'm just basically going to do what I was telling you. I'm going to take my pocket screwdriver. I'm going to try to push in on the little tab. I'll you it once I get it off. I can push. There goes the tug. There we are. So all I did, push, pull. So that's what our tab looks like. Okay? So I'm going to do the same thing over here. Get this out of the way hopefully. Hold onto the tab, push. This one, a little different for some reason. Let's see if I got it. Aha. There it is. Take a look inside, make sure there's no funny colors. Looks pretty great. We can move ahead.

Okay. So I got my little hooky-do, fork tool. So what I'm going to do, is I'm going to try to release this right here. See if I can get it. They just have like these little teeth on them, so sometimes you can just work them back and forth. There it is. Got that off of there. That gives us more room to lift this up a little higher. Okay? So we're doing good here. All right. Now let's go ahead and remove these. Just little push clips, nothing too special about them. Should be four of these. Take that off. Set it aside gently.

So now under here we have the bracket that holds this. It's right here. It's mounted with four 10 millimeter headed bolts. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to take those out. I'm going to get this bracket out of the way. That'll give us a little bit more working room. And since when we tried to take out the fans it needs to come straight up, that bracket needs to be out of the way. So you can use something like a ratchet wrench or a socket, or whatever you've got. 10 millimeter heads though, we're going to take those right out. So this is the last of the four bolts, 10 millimeter, over there with the rest. See if we can move this bracket now. That's what it looks like.

So now I got a nice view from under here. I'm going to see if I can remove this one. There we are. Got one more. Okay. Now we got plenty of room moving this puppy around now. All we're going to have to do is just get it far enough so we can move it this way, so when we're pulling this up we can slide it out, okay?

So now we're going to use our flathead screwdriver. I'm just going to go right down along here. I'm going right along the fan assembly. There's a little thing right here that holds this wiring. I'm just going to try to give it a little bonk. Okay? There we go. So I bonked it, I gave it a little twist. The reason why I had to give it a twist is because there's a little nub right here, right where my screwdriver's touching, that goes in from the front. Boop!. And that just holds it in, so when I go to connect it I'll just push it right in and we'll be good to go. Okay? So now we'll move over to the other side. We'll see what's holding the wires on over there. And then we can go ahead and remove the two bolts that hold it. And we'll go from there.

So I'm going to bring my screwdriver down right here. There's a little clip that's holding our wiring. Just going to pry it out a little bit. Try to bonk it out. It looks like it could use a little more. I'm just going to do the same thing. All I'm trying to do is push that clip out. Okay, getting close. And try a different method here. Grab our fork tool. I'm going to try this way, sticking it down in between there, prying it out. Okay. So now we want to make sure that it's disconnected all the way down. Feels pretty good as far as I can tell so far. Wonderful. Okay.

So now that we've got our wiring nice and loose, we're going to go ahead and start trying to do these mounting bolts. There's an 8 millimeter over here, and another one located on the other side. Just going to come in from this side, see if I can get it on there. I'm going to fully remove this bolt, then I'm going to move over to the other side, do the same.

Okay. So now I'm going to try to do this bolt over here. This one's a little harder to get to. We've just got to kind of finangle our tool in. See if we can get our eight millimeter socket on the head of the bolt. I'm going to try to get my hand down there real quick. See if I can find the bolt. So close. Okay. I got it in there. If you have access to an air ratchet, it's probably going to be helpful. I want to see if I can come from up here, see if I get a little bit more swing. I'm just going to remove this bolt right here. Then we'll be clear to continue to see if we removed all of the wiring. Make sure that it's nice and free to be removed. Okay, hoping that I've got it loose enough that I can grab it with my gloved hands. Yep. Try not to drop it Len. There it is. Set it aside. Okay. We can get our tools out of the way a little bit.

I'm just going to gently try to lift up on it. Take a peek. I can see down between now so that's good. Gives us a little bit of an insight on what we're looking at here. I'm going to look over here. Okay, so we have, looks like a lower hose that going to be in the way on this side. On this side over here we have an upper hose that's going to be in the way. So we're going have to just do a little bit of finangling and hopefully we get this up high enough without having to remove any cooling hoses. If we do, it's not a big deal. It's just we'll have to have a recycling bucket and make sure that we have access to fluids to fill it.

Kind of feels like something's sticking down over on this side, so I'm going to try to take a better look and analyze my situation. All right. So I got my safety glasses on. I'm going to come under the wheel well here. I'm just going to try to come with my little forky tool, pull that pushpin. Get it out of the way. Now I want to see what's holding this wiring harness to my fan unit, okay? Because something's holding it up down here. So I'm going to try to wiggle it around. I could see a little pushpin right there where my finger is, okay? So that's what's holding us up from getting it up.

I'm going to go like this, see if I can grab it with my tool. If I can't, I'm going to grab some of my cutters, I'm going to try to work at it that way. But first I'll try this way. So it's out a little bit but not enough. Got my cutters. I'm not going to try to cut it, but all I want to do is just squeeze them in there somehow and then just try to twist and see if I can get that out. Come on, almost there. There we are. It's not cut. Great job Len. You might have wanted to cut it, but you didn't, that's nice. Okay. So we're going to leave this like this so we remember that we need to tuck it back in and we're going to put that clip back into our new one, so... Let's bring it back down. We'll move along. Okay.

So here we go. I'm going to try to squeeze this clamp right here with my pliers. Once I get it squeezed I'm going to try to wiggle the hose, try to get it off. I've got my recycling receptacle down there so I don't have to worry about any coolant getting into the ground, contaminating my Mother Earth, save the penguins and dolphins and such. Here we go. That won't be right out of the way. Very nice. Okay. I'm trying to give it a little wiggle. Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle. Wasn't me. Here we go. Make sure you watch your face and eyes just in case any fluid happens to come out. Here we go, okay. We are cruising. Try to set this up so hopefully less coolant will come out.

Okay. Now God willing, we'll be able to slide this over and we should be able to get this housing out. Here we go. Okay. So we still got the bottom on that side holding us. Some stuff over here trying to hold us up. Just keep on trucking. Trying to pay attention to what it's dragging on down there. There we go. This side is so close to being ready to come out. If this side could just come up. Okay. Slow and steady wins the race, right friends? Try to put this back again. There we are. And there it is. All right. And the rest is all up to you.

So here we have our original part. As you could tell, beat, been in New England for a while. It's time to replace it. So I want to replace it with a quality 1A Auto part here. What you'll see is you have your connections here for this motor. You have them on the backside here which you can't really see but you're going to have to imagine they look exactly like these because they do for this motor, okay? Got our fans on here. Looks as though all the mounting areas are the same. You got these right here. The same going down this way, all the way around, okay? There really isn't anything different about it, in exception of this one's quality with a warranty and you can always find it here at 1aauto.com.

Okay. So we've got our new fan assembly here. We have our radiator right here. Now's a great time to take a peek at it, see if it looks like it's pretty dirty or if any of the fins are rotted out and missing. If you were going to replace that radiator, well now's the time to do it really because you'll be able to pull it right out of there in, I don't know, probably about 15 minutes at this point. Hardest part is done.

So we're going to go with the assumption that your radiator is still good because for this video all I'm replacing is the fans. And the radiator actually looks okay on this one so I'm not worried about it. We've got our wiring here. I'm going to see if I can put it up and out of the way a little bit. See if I can turn this so I can show you this piece right here. That's what was giving us our issue down on the bottom hose down there. The hose sits here so when I was trying to lift it, it was just going bonk, bonk, bonk, right? Pain in the butt. That's why we had to take off the upper hose up there.

So when we go in, we're going to try to put this side down and in, and then just weasel this passenger side down afterward okay? So let's try to get this in without dragging it too much along the radiator and messing up too many of those fins. Optimally, we don't want to mess up any fins, but it's human nature to make mistakes. We're just going to try our best here. We'll do it together. If it seems like it's getting snagged, it probably is. There's a whole bunch of wires still connected here that it could get caught on. So when you're pushing down, if it feels like it's getting super stuck, just stop and take a little look, doesn't hurt anybody.

So I'm getting caught right here. I've got this piece hitting up against my upper radiator hose area. So I'm just going to try to push it in a little further. See if I can sneak it over those wires. This is exactly how it came out. Nice and slow. It was a pain in the butt. Part of the fun of it though. See if I can get this past the wire over here. Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay, still moving. All right. So over here, we're catching on these wires over here. So I'm going to try to lift it, wiggle it over. You're going to have to do your own thing to get it down. Basically what you want to do is just make sure that you're not catching on any of your wires, you're not dragging it down the cooling fins on your radiator, and just go slow. Pay attention to your own. Every truck is going to have its own issues of trying to do this, okay? So my fight's going to be a little bit different than yours, but we're both in the same fight and we're loving it.

See if I can get this up over here. Couple wires under here, right. Just going to try to lift this up. Okay. Okay, so it took a little bit of finangling, but I finally got this cooling fan assembly in, into the little grooves on the radiator. Like I told you, the radiator has things like this. The fan assembly on the bottom has a little prong that goes in like this, one on this side, one on that side. Originally I had it like this. And over here was pretty darn close, it might have been in, might have been out. But anyways, over here was really off. So I had to pretty much lift it all back out, almost all the way, kick it in, get it weaseled in, and now it's sitting perfectly flush up against the radiator the way it should be.

So now I'm clear to go ahead and install these bolts. This is our eight millimeter head bolt right here, okay? This goes in over here, and the other one goes in over there. So all I'm going to do is try to get this into the hole between the fan, or the hole in the fan assembly and into the radiator. Just like that. Just going to get it in a few threads. I'm not going to tighten it down. See if I can do it with this. This is a voltage unit on here for the charging system, so I don't want to break that. I'm just turning that in. I feel like it's got a few good threads at this point. I don't have to worry about it lifting up and out. I'm going to make sure that I don't tighten it down all the way. I want to still be able to move this around a little bit in case I have to.

I'm going to move over to this side. I'm going to put in my eight for this side. There it is. It's right down here. If I can lift it a little bit, that's the whole point of not tightening up that side is so I can still move this around. Got it. Now I can go ahead and tighten this down completely and I'll go do the same to the other side and we'll move onto the next step. Okay. Feels pretty good. Give her a little wiggle. Feels great. Let's move on to the next step.

We're going to grab our hose. We're going to get it back on here. We'll start getting everything else rolling as well, okay? So I got my hose, try to pull it. Here we go. We'll just take a peek at it, make sure it doesn't look like its dry rotted, cracked. There's nothing really too crazy going on with it. If it looks like it is cracked, maybe it's been on there a long, long time. Well now's the time to go ahead and replace it because you only got to take off one other side and it's right down there. Easy peasy.

For the purpose of this video, and the fact that there's nothing wrong with it, I'm just go ahead and put it back on. There we are. We're going to make sure that we put our clamp exactly back where we got it from. You could tell because there's already grooves where it was sitting. It liked that spot. It's been there for a long, long time. Let's put it back. Just like the little turtle you find on the side of the road. Going to see if I can get it down over here. I might have to regroup my pliers real quick. Just work it right back to where it was. Okay. A little bit of a wiggle.

If it feels as though your clamp lost its spring retention, just go ahead and replace it with another clamp if you happen to have one. You definitely want to make sure that this isn't going to leak on you driving down the road, okay? So we want to make sure, now that we've had that hose off, we need to make sure that we fill this up again. So the best thing to do would be to take this off. Put it someplace where we're definitely going to see it. And now we can't forget to fill that up again.

We can continue working on our job. Slide this a little bit. You can look down. Okay. We've got all these areas right here. All this wiring. It's pretty easy to remember where everything goes. This is the mass air flow sensor. Here's your two fans, okay? So we'll go ahead and plug those in. We're already checked them to make sure that they were in great condition and they were. So we're super happy about that.

Now I'm just going to take this. Listen for my click. And do this one. Same thing, I'm going to listen for my click noise. Give it a little tug, a little tug. Feels great. I'm going to put in this right here. Should go right into the hole. Careful pushing in, I mean you're just pushing into plastic and it's easy to break plastic. This one's going to go right in that hole, okay?

So they're nice and secured. You don't want to try to leave these off. If you can them back on, put them on if they're not broken. If they are broken, if you could a way to secure them that would be great. You don't want them flopping around, possibly getting into where your fans are, or getting caught on anything. They're meant to be secured in nice and firmly. So just try your best. The most anybody can ask from you, is just do your best okay?

Now I'm going to grab my bracket while I still have plenty of room to lift this up. I'm going to put it under. I'm going to mount it in, then we'll keep on rolling, okay? We've got our bracket, okay? Got our four mounting holes. Those go right along here. One, two, three, four. It's going to go just like this only underneath this. So I'm going to lift it up. See if I can get it under there. I love it when this stuff struggles with me because I live for it. I live for the fight. Sometimes that's all we got. Right. Here we are. I'm just going to try to lift it up and out of the way a little bit. Get it lined up. It's got a little lip here. This is just going to go over. It'll help keep it still for you. Thank you little lip.

Got my four mounting bolts, okay? See if I can wiggle this around a little bit. There it is. They're coarse thread, so that's nice. That just means you won't have to turn them in a million times. It'll only be half a million times. Great. Wonderful. Okay, let's keep moving.

Remember when we were taking this off, we had these little clippy-dos, right here, right here. They go there, there. And then it should line up on the other side as well at the same time. So let's get them lined up. Just like that and like that. Check this side, looks great. Bonk, bonk, feels pretty great. Awesome. We are cruising.

There's a little stud that's going to be inside our old assembly right here. So we're going to grab that in a minute. But we'll go ahead and we'll put this in right here. Should just slide right in. Well, it looked like it was going to, there it is. Now this goes like that. That's in like sin. Once we get our thing on there, that'll hold that. We'll come across. Feels good. What's this? Oh mass air flow, nah, we don't want to forget that, right? We'll go ahead and clip that in. We're gong to listen for a click. Very nice. Wiggle's good. So now I'm going to try these clips. I'm just going to find the hole, try to push it in. You're going to have to use whatever you got to use to get it in. I'm going to keep trying with my hands here for a second, and then I might have to resort to something a little different.

Okay, it's not quite in as you can see. So we'll have to see if we can figure out something else to get that in there. I don't know. Let's try what I have at hand. Maybe it's not the right tool, but maybe I can at least try to make it work. I don't know. Essentially we just want to make sure that is inside its hole so our wiring harness can be secured. Okay? So whatever you have to do to get that to happen. Soon as put my hands there I lose vision. Okay, that's in. I'm going to come up here. You got another one right there. It goes in this hole. So I'll line it up, wiggle it. Got one right here, okay? It goes in there. We are cruising friends. Take a look at everything, what we can see. Okay? Looks pretty great from here. Now let's go back inside the wheel well real quick. We'll grab that one last one down there. We'll put in the other push clip as well. We should be all set to start filling this puppy up with some coolant.

All right. So we've got our little white push clip here, right where my finger is. That's going to go up into this hole right here, so it's going to be a little bit of pushing. All this wetness right here is coolant, so if you're not wearing gloves you're going to want to make sure that you wash your hands pretty much right away. But I would just recommend wearing gloves if you access to them, because safety first, right?

I'm just going to lift it. See if I can get it to go in that hole. If it doesn't, then maybe it's just that mangled. We can go ahead and use a zip tie. And you'll just go through that hole and then wrap it right around the wiring. But luckily I got it in, so go me, right? Go Team Blue, 1A Auto. Now I'm going to push in this little pushpin into its hole. That's where it likes to be, nice and secured. Perfect. Now we can go back up top and we'll finish up up there.

So I've got my 11 millimeter socket. I'm just going to try to take this stud out of here so I can put it into our new assembly. I'm going to put my ratchet on reverse, or off. I'm going to turn to the left. If it seems like it's really stiff and it's just going to twist and break the plastic, just go ahead and spray it down with some sort of penetrant. Save yourself the hassle. This seems like it's coming out fairly good. There it is. So let's put it in the new one real quick.

So we've got our stud with our little washer there. That's going to be face down. Just going to screw it right down into this hole right here. Okay? Using my 11 millimeter again. All I'm going to do is snug this up. I don't need to go too tight because I don't want to break anything. I don't want to break this plastic fan shroud that I just spent plenty of time trying to show you guys how to put in. And I sure as heck don't want to buy another one. Feels pretty great. Okay. Nothing special about it.

Now we've got this right here. That's just going to sit right over this. Push right on, okay? If it seems like it doesn't want to go down, take a look at it a little better, then use your socket, bonk it down. Perfect. Okay here we go. Got our little plastic piece here... rubber, whatever it is. I don't know, kind of feel like its plasticky rubber, whatever. We've got our little piece here, okay? We've got our four push clips. I'm just going to line up the holes, one here, one here, one here, one here. And then here we go. Just push it in. And you get a push clip, okay? Let's go down the line here. Grab this one, doesn't seem like it wants to go in. Couple little bonks, no big deal. Just watch your fingers of course. There we go, they're down. Perfect. All right. Now let's go ahead and fill this up.

All right friends. So here we go. Now it's time to go ahead and fill our cooling system. I would love to use a product like this which is something that we sell here at 1A Auto. It's a quality product and it's great for most applications of filling cooling systems. If we were filling right at the radiator this would be something great to use because it comes with pretty much every adapter you could possibly think of, so that's amazing.

Unfortunately for this particular application, it's not really of too much use for me. What I need to do is I need to fill at the... This is the reservoir, but it's a pressurized reservoir so it's kind of complicated to explain. You could google it and get a real explanation of it, but essentially it doesn't work the same as a regular radiator with it. This is all one part of the pressurized system. So we released coolant from over on this upper hose, so coolant came out of there, air went in there. So now we've got air trapped over here, right? So I don't want to just go ahead and fill it with a funnel and then just hope that it burps its way out as I'm running it because what's going to happen is is the water pump's going to get stuff spinning. It's going to aerate the air that's inside there, inside the coolant. You're going to have a whole bunch of little air bubbles. It's going to take forever to bleed out.

I prefer to go with a tool. Something like this for this particular application. Like I said, this is a great quality tool but for this application I need to go ahead and use this, okay? It's an airlift system. So essentially I've got it hooked up to my air hose. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to apply vacuum pressure to our cooling system. It's going to suck down all these hoses, make them nice and tight. It's going to get all the air right out and back up into here for me. And then I can go ahead and fill it up with the proper coolant that we need to use in this.

For what I'm going to be using, I'm going to be using a... It's kind of like a global, or a universal coolant. It works for Asian, foreign, domestic, pretty much everything. That's what it's made for. But if you don't have access to that, you would want to make sure that you do use the specified coolant that's meant for this particular vehicle, okay?

So anyway, here we go. I'm just going to get ready to apply pressure here, so to do that [AIR NOISE], but that doesn't really matter so much. There we are. So right now it's creating suction. It's sucking all the air from inside the system up into here for me. I'm just going to wait until it gets up to pressure and starts holding at a constant level. That means that I got all the air out of the system. So I'll just wait. Once it seems like it's holding pressure for a little while, I'm going to go ahead and block it off. Turn off the annoying air sound there. And now I'm just going to watch and wait. You might see it go down a teeny bit but then stop. You basically... You just want to make sure that it doesn't go down a teeny bit, and then a teeny bit, and then a teeny bit and the next thing you know it's all the way down in the red. That means that you got a leak somewhere.

There are possibilities that certain things could have happened with the job that we were doing. Maybe our clamp that we put on wasn't really in the best of condition and it loosened up. It might not have had as much spring tension as what we needed in which case we would have to replace that clamp. Or God forbid, maybe we damaged the radiator going down with any of this, or wiggling things around. So this is a great way to test to make sure that you're holding pressure, okay?

It hasn't moved in a while. Generally speaking, if it's going to lose pressure, it's going to do it within the first minute or two. You're going to notice quite a big drop. Some people will say you want to leave it on for five, 10, 15, 20. Who knows how long? People could say what they want to say, right? I think as long as it's holding pressure this long, it's probably good to go. All right.

So I'm going to relieve the hose here. I've got my filler hose, a little mesh on there. I've got my new coolant. This is already pre-mixed. Do not add water. It says that it's great for American, Asian or European. It's great for everything really, so that's perfect. So this is what I'm going to go ahead and use, okay? Just going to ahead and get the cap off. Put this all the way down in there. Now when I'm doing this part, I'm going to be trying to watch the cold fill line. I haven't been running this vehicle so we should want to watch for the cold fill, that's right here. Watch what's going to happen, okay? This is going to keep going up for a second. All right. Now I'm going to ahead and go like this, bring it down, bring it down. It's pretty close. It's not bad. We can go ahead and take a little bit of coolant out of there if we want.

But we might also like to do though is let's just run it for a little bit. Let's run it. We'll let it get hot, just in case there maybe is an air bubble in there, which it's very doubtable that there will be. It might suck a little bit more coolant down. After we've run it for a little bit we'll go ahead and recheck it and there should be a hot line. Let's see. I can't feel it, so maybe there isn't one. So I guess you're just going to have to go with a guesstimation. You've got the cold here. It should be right about there cold. It should be pretty much where my finger's at, hot. So right now if it's there when it's hot then we're doing all right. If it comes all the way up here some place, we're going to need to take some out, okay? So there we go. Now let's go ahead and take this tool off of here. We'll rinse it down so it's nice and clean. We'll put our cap back on and we're going to run it.

All right everyone, here we go. We're going to get inside. Make sure everything sparks up like it should. Put my foot on the brake here, start her up. What we want to do is just make sure that no funny lights turn on on the dash. We don't have a check engine light, nothing that says, "Oh you left your mass air flow sensor unplugged," or anything like that. I just got some doors open, so that's cool. Looks pretty good. Now we're just going to run it for a while. Every once in a while we'll check in. We'll take a look at what our temperature gauges and everything are doing here. Make sure nothing's going all the way into the H's or anything like that, all right? We could put our temperature dial here. Let's go ahead and put it on high and we'll let it run for a little bit.

Once we've had it running for a while and we know that we've burped out all the air inside the system, we should be able to feel hot air coming out of our vents. So we're going to set this thing so it's looking at the vents. Right now it's nice and cold air, because well, everything's cold, I haven't been running it. When we come in and recheck, we want it to be nice and warm.

So there we go everybody. Let's let it run.

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