ive got an 05 6.0L that ive been working with it has no power. blows black smoke when trying to accelerate. had code for turbo underboost, and exhaust back pressure too high. did some quick diag and settled on snail vanes being stuck pulled turbo cleaned and checked it was the worst stuck turbo ive ever seen cleaned got it working installed. still ran like crap. pulled egr guy says hes been having issues and i had a stored egr code. found the egr is stuck asked dude if wanted to clean or replace. he chose to replace so i did. also cleaned mapsensor port and made sure it had a good hose. he had replaced map 2 months ago with ford parts. still ran like crap and giving ebp too high code. used known good ebp and blew the tube out to be sure not stopped up. still has no power full throttle it pulls ok to 2000 rpm and is showing 30 lbs of boost. then it falls on its face and wont freakin move it smokes horrible if i try and pull a hill from about 20 miles and hour it wont upshift and just has no power its black smoke so im sure its getting fuel. i took the turbo back off took it to ford buddy who cleaned and air tested but he said its working fine, i put the turbo back on and it ran good for about 2 blocks parked it started it up 2 days later and its back to its old self please help pulling out my hair

 

I had exact same issue. My wire harness going to my EPB sensor was chaffed ever so slightly. Taped it up and away the problem went.

 

so i talked my ford buddy into looking at it he said when he air checked it it sounded great but now when its on the truck it wont actuate the vanes correctly he says the vgt actuator he swapped out for a known good one did the same. he thinks the roll pin in the actuator arm is faulty. but to me if it air checks them mechanicallyy your good id be worried about the electrical side but im no 6.0 expert and to be honest im kinda wondering about his expertise

 

How is he "air checking" the turbo? Air is no where near the same as what the motor feeds the turbo, heat is mostly what drives that thing, not just the airflow. If the turbo was as bad as you say it was, it's possible it was beyond just a cleaning, may need replacing. Tough call. Sure would be nice to have the truck in front of me with my labtop hooked up.

 

they have a fitting that bolts in place of the oil feed and a pig tail that they plug into vgt actuator, air acts like hydraulic oil pressure and then toggle battery voltage to vgt actuator to see if vanes respond when actuator is pushed out and returns back in he said with air on it and turbo off it responds with it on truck it does not i suggested using pigtail to supply power with it on truck to see if sound changes to indicate if we have an electrical issue or an actual turbo mechanical problem. he said he was gonna mess with it and see. id feel much better if i had the equipment to read the sensors and actuate things so i could see for myself but i cant drop down a couple of g's on a nice scanner ive got a genisis evo but it cant do the stuff i want to do

 

Autoenginuity with the enhanced Ford bundle is about $350. All you need is a labtop beyond that. I can do a lot with just AE. IDS would be nice, but again, a lot of money like you said.

So is it still throwing any codes? It seems like you had some, and took corrective action, but you never said if they went away or not.

Thanks for the info on the turbo test setup. Seems pretty nice.

Is it possible the wire harness that has the VGT solenoid plug is faulty? Might be worth removing it and going over it with a fine tooth comb.

 

ok so we got it now. the underboost codes and the ebp codes still came up, we pulled snail off disassembled completely he used a special punch or something that goes in and allows you take " the pin out of the rack so you can remove the arm for the unison ring". come to find out the pin was sheared into 3 pieces causing the rack to grab the arm at times mainly when there was no exhaust side pressure. ie when air checking there is no resistance when the turbo is on the bench bc there is no exhaust or charge air. therefore worked great on the bench but when the truck was running the rack just twisted on the arm with no movement. $400 bucks later it back on and we are fixing to test drive, arm and pin, seals and misc stuff

 

Nice, glad to hear you got it fixed. Hopefully that does it. Glad to see you follow up on here too for future wrenchers.