How to Replace Starter 2011-16 Ford F250

Hey friends, it's Len here at 1A Auto. Today I'm working on a 2013 Ford F250. This is the 6.7 diesel. I'm going to be doing a starter. It's going to a fairly easy, slash, semi-difficult job. It's really not too bad. The hardest part is just getting the starter kind of weaseled up but you can do it. I can do it too. We'll get it done together. Anyway, if you need any parts, you can always check us out at 1AAuto.com. Thanks.

I've got the hood up, that was easy enough. I'm going to remove the negative battery terminal. Something to keep in mind when you do that, is that you're going to lose all your presets on your radio and have to reset your clock and if you have a security system on your radio, that could cause an issue as well. Keep that in mind. But when you're doing the starter, you're going to be removing the positive power wire off of it. When you remove that, if you happen to touch it against anything else that's metal, that might ground it out, you're going to get arcing. By removing the negative, we're going to avoid that situation.

Remove the negative. Just going to loosen it up with our eight millimeter. We're going to get it down and out of the way. That's good enough. We know that it can't pop up and make connection while we're underneath the vehicle.

Now we're going to come over here to the other side, this vehicle has two batteries in it so you want to be aware of that. Just going to loosen the negative battery terminal. Same thing like the other side. Going to lift it, get that down and out of the way. There we are. Let's move along.

Now we're going to go ahead and take off this center cover. Just going to put a, anything really, but I've got a rag. Just going to go on against the wheel so I can pry without scuffing up my wheel. Set this aside. We'll use our 21 millimeter, if you have access to an air gun, you could do that. Just going to zip these off. See if we can get this wheel to break free. There it is. Get our last lug nut off. Now we'll get the wheel off.

Okay, everyone, so we got the wheel off now. The starter is located right back here. It's very easy to get to once you get this out of the way so what I would like to do, is I would like to take out this eight millimeter head, this one up in here and then there's one all the way over here. Take those right out. I'm going to take out this one right here. That's a five and a half millimeter, I believe you could also a quarter inch. This one, this one, that one doesn't look like it had anything. You don't really probably need to go too much further, you could do this one if you wanted to but essentially we just want to kind of pull it out and away. If you want to, you could take the whole thing right out, push out this push clip. Seems like a little bit of extra effort. Just take out what you need to. Pull it out of the way. You'll be able to get a clearer view of what's going on in there and you'll get some work done. Let's move along.

All right, so here's what our new starter looks like. I matched it up, it's the same as the old one. There's going to be three mounting holes, one here, one here and there's a threaded one here. When this is up inside the vehicle, which would generally be speaking like this, you've got one bolt hole that's going to be here, pretty easy to get to. This one is on the opposite side of the solenoid so you're going to need a special tool, maybe a swivel or whatnot to get to it. And this one right here, comes from the backside, from the transmission side, through the bell housing and then it comes through I believe, the engine and then into this. It's threaded. This right here is where your wiring's going to go to. You've got a 15 millimeter nut and a 10 millimeter nut. Both of them come with new locking washers so that's great. Now you know what to look for. The hardest part's just going to be getting this one back here but you can do it. Let's move on.

All right, so I'm going to take a 15 millimeter wrench or whatever you happen to have and I'm just going to try to take off this nut right here. Slippery. Once it get it removed, I'll move onto the next wire. Tighten it by hand here, it's almost off. There we are. My 15, set that aside so I can find it. Now I'm going to take the wire off and check it out, make sure it doesn't look like it's corroded or rotted or ready to fall apart. This one looks decent. We'll clean it up later. Now I'm going to remove this nut right up here. This is for the little wire. I'll find the size for that and we'll move along.

Now I'm going to remove the lower wire, the little one. I'm using a 10 millimeter. Turning to the left of course. Get that off of here. There it is. Set that aside. Take that wire off, take a peek at it. Pretty good, it's not corroded or rotted, falling apart. I'd say it's definitely clean it and reuse it. Perfect. Always a special treat. Okay, now we need to remove the mounting bolts for this. There's one located right up on the backside of this right here. It's right there and there's one right here and then there's one located that's easier to get from the bottom. They should be 13 millimeter bolts so let's grab that and we'll move along.

Okay, I'm going to start with the hardest bolt to get to first or what looks like it's going to be the hardest bolt to get to first. I'm going to use this setup right here, just a swivel with a 13 millimeter extension and a long ratchet. You can use whatever you've got access to. If you've got a swivel socket, that will probably come in handy as well sometimes. There we go. Just going to turn that to the left now, it's nice and loose. Holy cow, there's my bolt. There's what my bolt looks like. I've got two more of these, I'm sure. Or something like them. That I'm going to try to get now. I'm going to go for this one, 13 millimeter still if I can get it on there. Almost. There it is, bolt number two. Looks like it's about the same as the first. And the last one I'm going to grab from underneath. There should only be three mounting bolts. We've got two out of three. We've got both our wires off so once we get this one loose and out, the starter should be ready to come out.

Here's our last bolt head, 13 millimeter. It comes through the transmission housing, through the engine and then into to starter. It screws into there. It's a pretty long bolt, probably about that long. See if I can get it off of here. All right, I going to see if I can get this on here. There's our last bolt. All right, starter should be all set to move around a little bit. Very cool. All right, look at that. Somebody left their socket up there. Mine now. Okay, so now we're just going to weasel this out of here. There we go. This can be done. It just takes a little bit of finagling. Just going to try to wiggle it around, see if we can get the back as far towards to motor mount as possible. Get it in there. I'm just going to try to twist it and lift it up and out. That's my plan at least. Whether or not it works, who knows?

Just going to see about pulling on these prongs that hold it along the grooves there. I can just slide it off just a little locking clip. Should just want to slide out. We're close. There it is. Just take a peek at it, looks good. Not very corroded or anything. That's always good. Here we go. There we go. See if we can pull it up and out of here. There it is. Now you've seen it done, I wish you luck.

All right, so the next thing that I'm going to do is while the starter is out, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to clean up those wires. The areas where they're going to be touching up against the starter, it's very important to make sure that you have great connection. You don't want any dirt, debris, corrosion, rust, nothing. It needs to be very clean. You can use a little bit of sandpaper, can use a little brush or you could just use something like this, this is just a scuffing pad. I'm just going to clean it all off. I'll get a nice shiny surface on there and then we'll go ahead and get the starter in and wire it up.

I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to take off my nut, my locking washer there. Doing the same thing on the small side. There we are. Oops, come on. There we go. Now we got everything. Perfect. We'll set this aside. Now we're going to finagle this starter in there.

Here we go. See if I can get the starter up and in. Move this light. There we go. Just put that over there for now. Now I really can't see. I'm going to grab the flashlight and we'll continue. Fell right in. That's something nice. Too bad it didn't fall right out. I'm going to grab my bolts. I've got my two upper bolts, they're both the same, I can't mix those up. That's always nice. See if I can get it started in. If you need to, you can use your socket or whatever you want to do. 13 millimeter. There we go, I've got my 13 and my swivel extensions and all that set up on here. Just going to go ahead and see if I can get it turned in. Let's see.

That one doesn't look like it wants to go yet. I probably have to have the starter in a little closer so I'll do this one down here. I'm just going to get them close because I still have that bottom bolt to start in as well. We never want to tighten any bolts completely until you have all of your bolts started. It's pretty good practice at least. Just said that guy up top, that bolt up top is hardest one. I'm going to see if I can get my ratchet on there. See if I can drive it on a little bit and then we'll go ahead down to the bottom and we'll get that bolt started. Get it on there. Little 16th of a turn at a time here. That's started in pretty good. Let's go grab that bottom bolt, we'll get that one started and then we can worry about tightening everything right up.

There we go. That's our bottom bolt. Just going to get it in and started. Can wiggle the starter around still. It's part of the reason why we left it loose, is so we can line this bolt up right. Once we're sure we got it all the way in, you can go ahead and snug it up. You can do the others. If you wanted to, you could use your definitely not a half inch gun, you don't want to break the bolt or break the transmission but you have maybe a 3/8ths or an air ratchet, could go with that. There we go, 3/8ths and my 13. There we go. I'll snug that up with my ratchet in a minute. I'm going to do the other two first.

Here we go. I got a little air ratchet with some swivels and extensions on here. Snug. Very nice. Get this all off of here real quick. Go ahead and do the other one. Let's go ahead and tighten up that lower one. Get my 13 on there. Cool. Now I'm just going to snug them up with a regular ratchet, make sure they're nice and snug.

All right, my ratchet. There we go. Flips off, that's okay. Make sure it's nice and snug. You definitely don't want it loosening up. These engines have, they shake around a lot. That one's good. Get this one. Tight. Get our last one. Tight. All three are tight. Let's wire this puppy back up. We'll put our other wire on there and then we'll get the battery connected and we'll give it a try before we go ahead and put everything else together.

All right, here we go. First, I'm going to put on the little wire. Just going to put it right over the stud. And then I've got my lock washer and my nut, put both those on the stud. Very easy to over tighten these and break them. You just finished tightening up the mounting bolts, you're feeling a little strong. These don't need to be tightened up very much. Just pretty much just tighten it so it bottoms out and then that should be enough but use your best judgment because there is a lock washer there. Just because it stops with your fingers, doesn't mean it's going to stop with a ratchet or if you've got, you can use a wrench if you have that. This one here. Check it. Nice and tight. The wire's not moving around.

Going to grab our big wire now. Put it on the starter. I'm going to grab my new nut and new locking washer. Just going to get these on. Sizes may vary for these nuts so I could tell you that this one's a 16 but does that mean anything to what you're doing? I couldn't tell you. Yours may be different. Just to let it be said, I'm using a 16, you might be using something else. Once again, once you feel it kind of bottom out, doesn't feel like it wants to go anymore, just give it maybe a teeny bit and then that should be good. We'll make sure that the wires are not touching each other down at the connection area. That's very important. Looks good. Perfect.

Now I'm going to reach around and see if I can find that wire that I disconnected. It fell down somewhere so you have to bear with me. There it is. Cool. Got two little connectors on there, two connectors in this, just line those up. Push it on. Those little locking tabs as far down in there as you can. My flashlight. I get this pressed in as far as I can. I know that my two wires are tight, I tightened my mounting bolts. Let's move along.

Now it's time to connect the batteries. There's two batteries so all I'm going to do, I'm going to take this, I'm going to connect it on here. There we are. Tighten it up. Come on. Make sure that they can't move. Looking good. We'll go over to the other side, put that one on. Put that puppy on there. Try to get it down as far as possible. You can loosen it up, try and pry it if you want to, separate right there. Whatever you need to do. I like to have it down a little further than this so I'm going to grab something, I'm going to push it down. Just going to take a little socket, put it over it, I'm going to give it a little bonk. Bonk. Bonk, bonk. That's my thing. There we go. Down a little better.

Just going to tighten this up. This side right here, for my application is an 11 millimeter. Feels pretty good. Try to move it. It's going nowhere. Perfect. Let's grab the keys, spark it up.

Here we go. I've got the key. I'm going to put it in. Wait a second for everything to spark up, you know how diesels are. Blow plugs say they're ready. Beautiful. Let's do it one more time real quick. It starts. All right, let's finish this puppy up.

Here we go. I'm just go leave my little tie down thing here that I had holding this up. Just tie it up in here. This isn't really part of your truck I'm sure. Somebody just did some kind of after market lighting thing and I don't think it worked out the way that they wanted it to so they just left the wires. We'll get that up in here and then we'll move along.

There we go. Wearing our safety glasses of course, we get a lot of debris falling down. Cool. I've got three eight millimeter head bolts, giant washers on them. One goes up here. Start it in right there. One goes up here. Just have to line up the hole. Looks like it's actually pretty good. Surprise, surprise. And then this one right here. We're going to leave them loose for now because we're going to continue on and we're going to put in a couple bolts going around this. These ones are much smaller. These are five and a half millimeter. I believe you can probably use a quarter inch as well, whatever you're into. You do you Boo Boo. These ones are a little bit harder to grab onto. I'm going to grab my tool, I'll start them in that way.

Just going to pull it in. I'll tighten them all down once I get them all started. Started. This one right here. It's the last one. All right, going to grab my eight millimeter, we'll tighten these up, we'll get the wheel up on here with our 21, torque them down to a 165. Maybe I'll grab a faster gun for this, who's got time for that? Cool. All right. We got all these all done in, looks pretty great, let's move along.

Okay, here we go. What we're going to do is we're going to get our big old heavy wheel up onto here. It's important to remember, you don't want to lift anything with your back if you can avoid. Don't go like this. Try to lift it up, you're going to hurt yourself. I want to live a long, long time, I want to be able to move around so I'm going to try to work smarter not harder. I'm going to put my leg up against it right here. I'm just going to roll it right up my leg and then I'm going to use my ab muscles, lift it right up. Easy peasy. I don't know how heavy this thing is but it's definitely going to be heavier than a 45 plate at the gym.

Just get all these started on here and then we'll bottom them out and then we're going to go ahead and torque them down in a star pattern. Or a guess this would a crisscross pattern, it's not really a star. Maybe a snowflake. Here we go. I'm going to go boom, boom, boom, boom and then so on. See how it's kind of kinked in a little bit? If I were to went here then here then here, this whole part of the wheel would have been sucked in and this part would've still been out. I could've been tightening and tightening and thinking that I had it all nice and snug, they're all perfectly the same but really the wheel hadn't even pulled up against the rotor at that point, which it would've been a big issue driving down the road. It would've loosened up at some point. Your wheel would be wobbling and eventually you'd probably break some lug studs and I don't want to talk about the rest but you can imagine.

Anyway, one, one, one, one. Here we go. See, look how far it pulled in. Start it again. There we go. Now I'm going to torque them down. 165 with my 21 millimeter socket. Okay, time to torque these puppies down. Let's do our snowflake again. Start here up top, down bottom. I'm going to go crisscross. 165. All right. I'm just going to hit them again. I know it's pretty much settled in so I'll just go around in a circle at this point. Cool. Get our center cover on. Use our rubber mallet. There we are. Easy peasy.

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