Hi, I'm Wade from Thoroughbred Diesel, and today we're going to teach you how to
change your glow plugs in your 7.3 liter Power Stroke diesel using a DieselRX glow plug.
The 7.3 Power Stroke is a little bit of an older model platform diesel engine, light duty diesel
engine that's out there today. These trucks have got several hundred thousand miles on them,
and what we suggest for you is if you're having any starting problems during the winter time,
if you're wanting to just raise reliability of your engine in the colder temperature months,
then we definitely suggest one of the first things that you do is replace the glow plugs
in your truck if they've never been replaced, or you're thinking that you've got any problems
concerning your glow plug system. Now we have a 7.3 that we're going to be doing this installation
on today. We're going to be using DieselRX's glow plugs, and I want to talk to you just
a little bit about DieselRX's glow plugs. Now, when I was studying for this intro video,
I actually had found one tidbit of information that completely blew me away. DieselRX is the
only glow plug that is made in the good old US of A. I could not believe that stat. I got that
right off of DieselRX's website, but sure enough, DieselRX is the only glow plug made
right here in the good old US of A. If you guys are shopping for American products, glow plugs,
this is the one for you. Really, really good quality glow plug on these. The materials
that are used in the manufacturing of DieselRX's glow plug, they resist corrosion and vibration,
damage that's caused by vibration. They've got superior electrical insulation and high thermal
conductivity. Conductivity is a really hard word to say. These glow plugs have also got a dual
coil design that allows for faster heat up and stabilizing of the temperatures of this glow plug,
and that's one of the things that makes the glow plug more robust, and it's going
to last you a long time. You're going to get good performance out of this glow plug.
And the heat concentration on these glow plugs are in the combustion chamber where you actually need
the heat heat concentration, so you don't have this heated all the way up the coil here. It's
concentrated in the combustion chamber right where you need it. Now again, like we said, replacing
your glow plug is going to get you a much better start-up, it's much better for your engine. You're
just going to have a happier engine in the winter months with good correctly functioning glow plugs.
So now let's go ahead and get started with our installation of our DieselRX glow plugs in our
7.3, this is a 2000 7.3, in a Ford Excursion. All right, we're going to go ahead and get started
and show you how to change the glow plugs in your 7.3 liter. This is a 2000 model,
so this is going to apply for all the 7.3 liters in changing of the glow plugs. Now, the glow plugs
are located underneath of the valve cover. So we also have a valve cover removal video that we will
link you to in this video, or the link will be in the description of this video. Also a good time,
while you're already here, go ahead and change out your gasket, your valve cover gasket and
your internal wiring harness. Just cheap and easy insurance to keep you from having a failure
on down the road, is what we suggest. You're already here, you might as well do it. We've got
a video on that too. We'll link you to that. But today, what we're showing you is we're just
showing you the proper way to replace the glow plugs in a 7.3 liter. Now like I was saying, the
glow plugs are located underneath the valve cover, and you can see this white wire here from your
internal harness goes right over to a black cap. Underneath of that black cab is actually going
to be your glow plug. So what you need to do when you start, when you're going to replace your glow
plugs, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to get that wiring harness off of there. If
time permits for me, when I do this, I really like to go ahead and just take the wiring harness off,
go ahead and remove it, and get it out of my way before I start working on the glow plugs.
But I'm just going to show you today how to change the glow plugs out here. So we can
go ahead and remove the wiring harness. Long nose pliers, and just gently remove that. Once you get
it this far up, what I like to do is I like to go ahead and take the injector connector, and I like
to go ahead and remove it as well. That gives me a little bit more slack for the glow plug wire,
so we're in pretty good shape there. Now, if you look down in there, you kind of see just
the tip of the glow plug, and see it's kind of immersed in this residual oil. What I like to
do before I actually pull this glow plug out is I want to go ahead and get rid of that oil.
So I'll use a little bit of shop air here, and I've got a cardboard cover. I like to just put
a cardboard covered, just keeps the oil splatter and very, very lightly with air,
I'll just go ahead and push that oil out, get it down and get it into the motor and get away
from that glow plug. Because when I pull the glow plug out, number one, I like to see what
I'm doing with the glow plug, and number two, I don't want that oil going down on top of the
piston. Probably not going to be enough for hydro lock per se, but I still just don't like doing it,
so I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to get my shop air and we get a little cardboard cover,
we'll cover this up and we'll move that air out. You can see that little bit of air just like
pretty well cleaned out around that glow plug. All right, I just want to talk just a little
bit about the entire scope of this job that is changing the glow plugs out on a 7.3 liter. First
off, really, really need to be really, really aware of what you're doing with this because
you're working on this truck with the valve cover off of, so you can drop something in here that can
be ingested into the engine, for lack of a better word, dropped down in, and really give you a bad
day, man. That's probably the one of the first things. There's a lot to that, and you just got
to be very, very cautious of what you're doing. One thing I always like to do when I'm working on
the 7.3 glow plugs in particular is I like to use a locking extension, if you've got one of
these. These are a really, really nice thing. You don't have to worry about dropping your socket
and then going somewhere where you can't get to it, worse yet falling on down into the block,
which is really, really bad deal. This is worth its weight in gold if you are doing
this job on the 7.3 trucks. Now truthfully with the 7.3s, where the glow plugs are underneath
the valve cover, you don't run into a lot of problems with them. They're usually pretty
easy to get out. The top of them are pretty well oiled, so it's not like a Duramax where
it's just a crapshoot of whether it's going to break or strip out or whatever. Knock on wood,
they usually come out pretty well. But if you run into a problem with them, let's
say you're not able to get the glow plug loosened up, you're putting a pretty good amount of force
against it, it won't loosen up. One thing that you can do at that point. You can go ahead and put the
valve cover back on it. The truck will run without the valve cover on it. It's a little messy,
but it'll do it. You can put the wiring harness back on the injectors, start the truck and run
it, and put the valve cover back on it start it and run it, let the truck come up to temperature,
and then pull your valve cover off, which is a pretty quick and easy job. Check our video
out for that. Pull the valve cover back off, and that little bit of heat might be just exactly what
you needed to get the glow plugs on out. They may spin right on out for you no problem.
If you've had a glow plug failure, the end of it could have swole and it won't come back out of its
hole there. If you run into that, you've crossed the bridge of what are you going to do at that
point? Am I going to just leave the glow plug in or am I going to go ahead and pull the head off
and do a correct fix on it? I hope that doesn't happen to you if you're watching this video,
but... So we've got our wire off. We're going to go ahead and go for this glow plug,
show you a couple of tricks I do. Again, I'm using a locking extension here,
so I don't have to worry about removing the tool. I'm going to move my hands so Adam's
got a little bit better thing there. There's about 14 foot pounds of torque on these.
Once I get the glow plug on the 7.3s loosened, I started working my socket up and make sure because
it can come to a point in here when you get to the push rod, just depending on where that valve is at
the time, it can get a little tight, but I like to try to just keep loosening it, moving my socket,
make sure it releases well. And once I get it to where I know there a little bit of tension on the
socket, I'm just about out of my travel, what I use is a little set of some carburetor hose,
fuel hose here, and I'll push it down onto the glow plug, right on the end of it, and then...
Sorry, I don't want to hit your camera. I'll use a little piece of this carburetor hose, a quarter
inch fuel line... There you go. What I'll do with this is this lets me twist the glow plug out.
So I had just a little bit of a debacle there with our hose. The hose that we use for this is a
little bit old and wore out. So we're going to do this again. I went ahead and put the glow
plug back in all the way there, and Adam and I had a creative discussion as how we wanted to
shoot this scene. Adam won, so here we go. So what we're going to do is we're going to show you what
we normally do. Normally we have a piece of hose. It's not as wore out as the piece of hose I was
trying to use was. All the same rules still apply here. Just be conscious of what you're doing.
All right. Now let's try the hose trick. So we've got a new little piece hose. I'm
going to use it to... Oh yeah. She's spinning right out there. And again,
that just keeps you from being beaten around in there with a socket. Works pretty good,
till it doesn't work, like you'll see in the previous shot and hope Jim doesn't keep all
that in there. That pulls your glow plug out. We've got our new DieselRX glow plug here. Really,
really good unit. We're going to go ahead and pop this back in. Then we tighten this
to 14 foot pounds for the 7.3s. Just a word about anti-seize a lot of people question,
should you use anti-seize on these or not? I don't on the 7.3s, and the reason why I don't on the
7.3s is just like I was saying in the beginning of the video, the oil saturation underneath the valve
cover here, I don't run into that kind of problem. I don't think anti-seize is probably going to hurt
anything. It will conduct electricity because the glow plug makes ground to the block, so it should
be just fine in that regard. I've never seen a installation spec call for anti-seize on the 7.3s,
so I've just truly never used it. We've never had a problem with it, so... Click.
There it is. There's our glow plug re-installed. And at that point, what you'll do is you just put
your wiring harness back on and away you go. I'm going to go ahead and do these other four
glow plugs. Nothing different here. This is the passenger side of the vehicle. Everything's pretty
well straightforward and you can get to it. Like I was saying earlier in the video, to me, it's a
little bit easier just to go ahead and remove the valve cover gasket, or at least undo your internal
harnesses there at the injectors and move them out of your way. So on this truck in particular, we're
going to be changing out the valve cover gaskets. We'll link you to that video in there, again,
like we said, but we should be good to go. So DieselRX glow plugs, make them for all the
light duty diesels out there. Really, really good product. Can't say enough good about the company
and the product as well. Made in the USA. Really, really good stuff. So I'm Wade from Thoroughbred
Diesel. There'll be some links in this video for other parts of the 7.3 installations that'll
pertain to this. We appreciate you watching, as always. If you have a question about this,
give us a call and please don't forget to like and subscribe to our channel. Thanks for watching.