Anyone else have this, cold start tick for a few minutes. I know what it is but wondering if this is a normality thing.

Mine is a 5.0 but I think they are about the same at the crossover pipe where the leak is.

It's an exhaust leak. The clamp on the driver side header pipe leaks when the engine is 1st started and for a few minutes until the pips warm up and it's gone. It's obvious and water drips out so I'm thinking this is a "on purpose" thing.

Either way I don't care for it. Rotating clamp might do it. Not sure yet.

 

Never mind, I see the relief and see that tons of others have this too. I'm not okay with the tick. It's rather loud. No need whatsoever to allow water to drain out of that part. It needs to be sealed up.

Motorcycle exhausts are like this, the split in the pipe is to allow the pipe to expand and clamp down when installed. The common knowledge to avoid a leak is to apply RTV to the pipe and then clamp down. The RTV fills the void and hardens. This may be tricky with the pipes already mated and without disassembling them. I do this on every Harley header to muffler joint. They usually have 2-3 of these little reliefs cut into them and will cause decel popping.

 

oh and to the genius that decided that orientation of the clamp was good and welded it to the pipe. Literally could not have picked a worse position for the clamp. fu buddy.

 

There's a hole in either end of the muffler to allow water out.

It's mildly annoying, but I plan on adding an aftermarket exhaust anyway, which will resolve that issue.

 

It's warm down here and it's loud to me right now. I can't imagine when it's actually cold how loud it will be.

My choices are:

1. break clamp weld off and rtv the joint and put new clamp on.

2. loosen clamp remove nut and bend bottom side down, apply rtv and tighten it back down.

3. Take to ford and have them do nothing as there is nothing missing or loose.

 

ok, so this is definitely on purpose. This appears to be a pathway. It's a shape cut out of the slip joint on the outer pipe.

I'm going to attempt orange RTV and let dry.

 

Coming from direct injection engines in my last two trucks I was surprised to hear my new 5.0 had the same valve tick sound. Nice to know where it's coming from and why its doing it. If the engineers designed it to be like this then that's how I'm going to leave it. I don't want my exhaust full of water reducing the flow through.

Clearly my last truck needed this. I replaced the muffler after 70,000kms and the stock muffler was completely full of water. It probably had 10l of water in it.

 

engineered exhaust leak?

 

Yes, if you read other posts on this, which I know you have cause your bought them back to life too, Fords has said that this is designed like this to drain water, once the pipe is warmed up it should seal the pin hole.

 

Ok, so I'm not going to sit here and say I'm an engineer but never in my life have I seen an on-purpose exhaust leak.