How should I approach this....?

One of our company vans, a 2013 e-250 Ford failed smog recently. There's a mechanic right next to the smog station and he said that it was mis-firing and the spark plugs needed replacing. Well this is one of those DOHC deals with the hard-to-access needle-nosed plugs, so that sounded legit and the price was fair so I said "do it". By the time that he was done, he'd also replaced a couple of coil packs and the intake manifold gasket. He said to drive it a few days to give the computer a chance to cycle and bring it back to the smog check.

This morning, my tech says, "this motor sounds like E36 M3, I'm pulling over". Tow it in and there's what sounds like a rod knock. Check oil and the pans virtually dry. 

Mother trucker! DO I know if my guy let the oil run down? No.  He says that he stayed on top of that. I don't know the mechanic. But what sort of Mickey-Mouse operator would do that much work and never check the oil level? You'd think that would be the first thing that he did before turning a wrench. My guy commuted in the truck and drove it to local jobsites for four days between when the mechanic had it and when the motor went. The other pertinent piece of info is it looks like the motor was never drained - the plug doesn't have any marks on it.

So if I had to guess, I'd say that my guy negligently let the oil run down, AND the mechanic negligently didn't pick that up. Any thoughts? And what should I do now?

...did you ask the mechanic to check the oil? 

Come to think of it, when he called me that the intake gasket needed replacing I asked if coolant had gotten in the oil. He told me that there was no sign of it.

If he wasn't doing any work that would have let any oil out of the system and he didn't claim to have done any sort of eleventy point inspection, I can't see why he would have checked the oil level.  I mean, I could see a shop doing a fluids level check and checking tire pressures as a courtesy and an opportunity to sell some additional services, but I wouldn't think it to be negligent for him to have not checked it.

Sorry about the trouble.  But for plugs and coil packs, I don't see touching the oil as a requirement of the job.

If it wasn't knocking when it was dropped off at the mechanic's place, I don't see that he would have had a reason to check the oil except to make a recommendation that you have him change the oil...

...which would make most customers start yelling about "upsells".

In reply to wae :

I see your point as well as Iansane and Duke's. But I specifically asked if water had gotten in the oil. How could he answer that question without checking the oil?

DIY guy chiming in: if an oil change isn't part of the job I'm doing, I don't check the oil. 
 

And now a joke: maybe when he said there's no sign of it, he meant oil, not coolant in the oil.

Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:

Come to think of it, when he called me that the intake gasket needed replacing I asked if coolant had gotten in the oil. He told me that there was no sign of it.

 

That muddies the water a bit. Normally I would have said it wasn't his responsibility to check the oil but you did ask about it.

My gut take would be that he didn't check the oil, just knew that on (what I presume is a 5.4/4.6) there isn't a direct path of coolant into any oil passages when you pull the intake.

No check oil light?

This is my opinion... if the vehicle was out of oil and your guy drove it for 4 days, the "red genie lamp" would have been on the dash. So that would mean the mechanic missed it when he moved it out of the garage, and the driver missed it for 4 days. 

I don't think I could blame the shop, and proving it would be even harder. 

Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to wae :

I see your point as well as Iansane and Duke's. But I specifically asked if water had gotten in the oil. How could he answer that question without checking the oil?

 

In my own defense, I was still typing when you had posted the bit about asking about coolant in the oil.  One would expect that if that was the ask, the quickest way to tell would have been to pull the dipstick and look there.  Perhaps he thought that by looking in the intake coolant passages for signs of oil in the coolant he could get to the same answer?

Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to wae :

But I specifically asked if water had gotten in the oil. How could he answer that question without checking the oil?

Did you get that in writing?

Part of my job sometimes entails contract disputes.

You can simply pull out the dipstick to see if the oil is milky and not really look at the level; suffice to say he could have looked for signs of coolant as the primary task which doesn't necessarily mean noting the level.

This could be deemed reasonable given the vehicle was driven 4 days prior to failure; any number of things could have happened in those 4 days. There is a distinction between diligence and negligence.

Further belaboring the point; how long had the van been run low on oil? If mechanic had he discovered this in the first ten minutes he could easily contend the bearings already significantly damaged when it came in.

There are too many open ended questions to say definitively it was the shops fault.

bobzilla said:

This is my opinion... if the vehicle was out of oil and your guy drove it for 4 days, the "red genie lamp" would have been on the dash. So that would mean the mechanic missed it when he moved it out of the garage, and the driver missed it for 4 days. 

I don't think I could blame the shop, and proving it would be even harder. 

That's a good point. No, I don't think that there's any future in going after the mechanic. The irony is that my guy who is assigned the van is a car guy and should so much know better. As for whether the mechanic should have checked the oil, I'm still kind of shocked that he didn't.  To me, checking the oil is kinda like getting your blood pressure checked at the doctors office. It gives you a glimpse into how much care the vehicle receives and certain bad things are going down. 

Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:

bobzilla said:

This is my opinion... if the vehicle was out of oil and your guy drove it for 4 days, the "red genie lamp" would have been on the dash. So that would mean the mechanic missed it when he moved it out of the garage, and the driver missed it for 4 days. 

I don't think I could blame the shop, and proving it would be even harder. 

That's a good point. No, I don't think that there's any future in going after the mechanic. The irony is that my guy who is assigned the van is a car guy and should so much know better. As for whether the mechanic should have checked the oil, I'm still kind of shocked that he didn't.  To me, checking the oil is kinda like getting your blood pressure checked at the doctors office. It gives you a glimpse into how much care the vehicle receives and certain bad things are going down. 

I see both sides of this. Maybe I've been watching too much VGG, but he always checks the oil. I should probably make that something I do more often. It only takes a couple minutes.

Someone mentioned doing weekly checklists. That sounds like a good idea. I think that's the direction that I'll go so that this doesn't happen again. 

If it is the 5.4 engine, the oil filter and cooler lines are fairly low in the chassis.   Is the van being driven at construction sites where they could have gotten snaged?  It would loose oil real fast if they were punctured.

Something else to keep in mind, the 5.4 and 6.8 in the e-chassis do have a habit of cooking the oil. Not enough cooling and certain oils (looking at you pennzoil) will bake themselves into jello. Pulling the stick could look like there was oil when, while true, it's more in gelatinous form. We saw a couple fleets have this problem with literally hundreds of these vehicles from vans to box vans. 

First thing first.... Turn on the key and see if the "low oil level" light comes on during the self-test, and see if it stays on.  If it does, your driver needs to be reprimanded accordingly.  If it comes on for the self test but goes off and stays off, it's pretty obvious that the van is lying and it's hard to blame the driver.  If it doesn't ever come on, that means the lamp died and it's hard to blame anyone.

When you asked the mechanic to check for signs of coolant in the oil, I see two possibilities:  1) he didn't and just told you he did, or 2) he did and the dipstick had oil splashed on it that he checked, but since there was no other indication that the oil was low, it wasn't even on his radar.  We all know that when you pull a dipstick you have to wipe it and re-dip to get an accurate reading, but he was just using it to visually look for a milkshake.  Either way, it would be very difficult to prove that the mechanic is at fault.

I can't imagine any tech being dumb enough to miss a low oil light, especially because it's a chance to upsell and add more money to their paycheck.

Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:

In reply to wae :

I see your point as well as Iansane and Duke's. But I specifically asked if water had gotten in the oil. How could he answer that question without checking the oil?

 

If it's a 3v Mod motor, there is no way to get coolant into the oil from pulling an intake manifold, so one could truthfully answer that no coolant got into the oil without even looking.

Same for a 2v or 4v, for that matter.

I kind of wonder WHY the intake had to come off, because it doesn't have to come off unless you're about to pull a cylinder head off, but I wasn't there.

I'm not seeing how the mechanic did anything wrong. He wasn't asked to check the oil. 
 

The guy who drives it every day knows it more intimately, but honestly eventually the maintenance of the vehicle is the owner's responsibility. 
 

Chalk it up to a learning experience, give your tech a weekly checklist, and define for him what your expectations are. If he doesn't live up to expectations, then make a decision whether he is worth keeping or not. 
 

Sorry you are going through this. 

There's another aspect of "was there water in the oil." That is, oil pressure is typically 20-80psi depending upon the temperature and rpm of the engine. Coolant pressure is typically 15-20lbs... so... it's more likely that oil would get into the coolant and not the other way around. It's possible that this was the mechanic's thinking as well, and since he did check the coolant, may have concluded that there was no mixing, hence the slighly misleading answer to the question. Just a theory.

In reply to kb58 :

Unfortunately there is a fallacy to that argument. from a chemical perspective coolant in oil is easier to detect. Their carrier salts stay even if the oil burns off the water.

Well I really don't like pointing fingers, and while I would hope that the mechanic would have picked up the condition, my guy drives the thing every day so it was mainly on him. I'm getting a remanufactured engine installed, and every Monday we are going to do a quick vehicle inspection. Lesson learned.

kb58 said:

There's another aspect of "was there water in the oil." That is, oil pressure is typically 20-80psi depending upon the temperature and rpm of the engine. Coolant pressure is typically 15-20lbs... so... it's more likely that oil would get into the coolant and not the other way around. It's possible that this was the mechanic's thinking as well, and since he did check the coolant, may have concluded that there was no mixing, hence the slighly misleading answer to the question. Just a theory.

The crankcase isn't 20-80psi, though, just some of the oil passages.

Either way, this is an OHC engine with a dry valley, the intake manifold has no access to the crankcase the way it does on a pushrod engine of a certain age.