Hi, I'm a newbie to the Sportsmobile forum,.. just stumbled on it last night while searching for an answer to my recent check engine light and registered immediately! I wish that I had found it a couple years ago!,.. after reading all of the posts on all 14 pages of this thread, all I can say now is "Un-F#*^in$ believable!"
I purchased my 2006 E350 Sportsmobile from the daughter of the original owner (sad story, her dad had a stoke) August of 2011, I got a great deal and it had only 18,648 original miles on the 6.0 L Diesel. Only about half of the accessories had been hooked up because he didn't trust Sportsmobile West to do it properly (for more stories like this, read
http://www.badgertrek.com),.. this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I was able to do most of the plumbing and electrical myself over the past couple years, hooking thing up the way I wanted them (more like a boat system) and setting the van up in a way that it more attuned to using it in a northern climate. (I'll post some pics and info, if anyone is interested?)
Anyway, just a week ago my wife and I completed the trip of driving our Sportsmobile up home to Alaska from her sister's house in central California. Before the trip I changed the engine oil in the Sportsmobile West installed Amsoil bypass oil system with fresh EaBp-100 and Ea026 filters and Amsoil 15w-40 DME Premium diesel oil. Since I had no good history on the maintenance (or lack thereof), as a precaution, I also changed the Mercon SP transmission oil in the 5R110 Torqshift transmission to the Amsoil SP version with new filters, and flushed and changed the coolant, using the Motorcraft Gold. We had a great trip from central California up the Alcan and Cassiar Highways to Alaska.
Just before the Alaska border, the check engine light came on and the van seemed to not have as much power when starting from a dead stop. Also, the RPM seemed to be about 500 higher for a given cruising speed, but other than that the engine starts and runs normally. Thinking that I might have gotten some bad fuel in the Yukon, I added a slug of Lucas top end fuel additive. This seemed to help a little bit, but as I suspected, the sightly higher cruising RPM caused a loss of about 3 mpg (from 15 down to 11) over the next couple tank fulls. Also, the overdrive "off" light on the column gear shift was flashing on and off (I didn't even know it was there until it started flashing). I still am not sure what is causing the CEL, but I'm thinking that it may be a fouled EGR valve or a dying turbo (any ideas?).
At dawn this morning I crawled under the van and confirmed that yes, my Amsoil bypass oil system appears to have been installed backasswards by Sportsmobile West as so many of your's were. This really pisses me off! As the second owner, I couldn't have expected Sportsmobile West to have notified me of their installation mistake,... except that in April of 2012 I took the van to Fresno and had Sportsmobile West do $3600 of work on it when it still only had just over 19,000 miles on it (btw, including $700 charged for installation of a 4D "AGM" house battery and leads, which has later turned out to be nothing but a standard sealed lead-acid battery, not "AGM" as specified and charged for!)
An honest business would have notified me of their original Amsoil system hookup mistake and corrected it for free. I would have even been happy to pay for the correction and an oil change under the circumstances, but they made no mention at all of this issue! H*#L, they could have quietly switched the hoses and put on a couple new filters when my rig was in their shop, and saved face. But noooo, now I have driven another 6000 miles, 5000 of it with new Amsoil oil and filters installed, only to find out through this site that the bypass system is hooked up backwards and this high-dollar synthetic oil and filter system probably isn't doing as good a job as the OEM FL-2015 filter with dinosaur oil would have done!
After reading about all of the modifications that need to be done to the 6.0 L diesel engine to keep it running without catastrophic failure, I'm beginning to think that I may not have gotten such a good deal on this Sportsmobile after all. I'm sorry to start my first post with such a rant, but I think that I am done doing any business with Sportsmobile West,.. they seemed like nice people, but their lack of honesty and transparency in dealing with their customers after committing such a massive screw-up as these backassward installations is unforgivable. Please notify me when the class-action suit is filed so that I can participate. Meanwhile, I'm going to send off for a Blackstone oil test, switch the hoses, remove the restrictor valve and replace the Amsoil filters, but run the existing oil until I get the oil test results back and can get enough new Amsoil to do a complete oil change again. Any words of wisdom on my CEL with only 25,000 miles on a 2006 6.0 L diesel engine?
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