Ford Focus Won’t Start No Clicking | Lakeland Mobile Mechanic Tips

Ford Focus Will Not Start Electrical, starter failure and video tutorial guide how to change, replace yourself or call auto car service known as Local Professional Mobile Mechanic that will come to you at your job, home or business location as well as pre-purchase used car buying evaluation inspection at any location near you.

All right guys, I got a 2010 Focus today that has a no crank, no start condition, and it’s not battery related. Our first indication, it’s a theft issue with the theft system. Because you turn the key on, everything proves out like normal and your theft light’s blinking, indicating you had the wrong key or you think the key’s bad or whatever. I’m telling you now Ford PATS keys are very, very reliable. In all my years at the dealership, I’ve never changed one for a PATS internal transceiver issue ever. Never ever.

So, without heading to the hardware store to get a new key or the dealer to get one cut and potentially have a tow bill and everything else, I’m going to show you a few things to check that Ford kind of designed into these vehicles and they redesigned it ’08. And it’s kind of like a flaw they designed in trying to simplify the ground system of the vehicle. And your big indication that the PCM which controls PATS on here, they got to talk to the cluster back and forth is not responding.

And you’ll see those dashes right there. Those dashes means it’s not the … The cluster’s not talking to the PCM. The PCM is not coming online, it’s not powering up. So we got a theft light and then we have dashes in the cluster. Now on some vehicles, I’m talking about a Focus right now, but on other vehicles with the no crank, no start theft light issue and it’ll show dashes in the cluster for the mileage. And that’s how I know they’re not talking either.

So it’s not necessarily a PATS transponder or a key issue or anything like that. You need to get the PCM back online to the network first before you even mess around with that. So I’m going to go to the engine compartment and show you what I found on this particular vehicle that I haven’t really seen in a while. And they had this problem on the Fiestas, because it uses the same kind of grounding system to simplify it. I don’t know, save weight, save money on the thick, expensive copper wire. I don’t know what the reason was for it, but unless everything’s just right, you’re going to have problems.

Okay. Back out in the engine compartment, we’re going to do a few checks and I’m going to show you what’s going on. Everything we’re going to check is right on top and it’s right in this area, so it’s nice and easy. And the background I’m talking about is this one right here. Now it looks good, right? Bolt looks good, it’s tight. The eyelet there looks fine. No corrosion. What’s the problem?

The problem is the eyelet or the bracket that they bolted it to was painted before they put that ground on and finished building the vehicle. So we have ground issues right there, but you’ll never know, because it looks great. So we’re going to do a few checks here. And the reason why these cars are so, they’re so bad about the ground issues being perfect is that this ground goes over and it feeds all the modules on the car.

So they have a good ground. So if this ground is bad they’re all going to either not work or they’re going to work erratically. So we’re going to look at our terminals on the battery, both of them, not just the ground. And these aren’t pretty, but they will have sufficient power to run that module. Cranking a strong crank, yeah, it’s a different story, but it will definitely power up that module. And we’ll have a PATS prove-out which this one does not have a PATS prove-out. It’s blinking. It thinks there’s theft going on because it’s not talking.

So we’re going to keep looking at this ground and we’re going to go over here and this is where you’re going to need some tools. You’re going to need eight millimeter socket, open end wrench, combo wrench, whatever you got, eight millimeters though. And we’re going to loosen this with the key on still and this connector fully connected and we’re going to see if all of a sudden it starts cycling.

Okay, so you may start loosening it, you’ll hear this. All the work that we need to do on this entails a piece of sandpaper basically. What we’re going to do is we’re going to clean this, get something to get rid of some of those paint. The actual threads in there are fine, okay. But we need a broader surface for that ground. So we’re going to clean some paint off where the eyelet actually rest on it. And then we’re going to clean the eyelet to see if some corrosion … It’s no big thing, but we’re going to clean the eyelet a little bit. But main thing is cleaning that paint off where the eyelet sits, so it has a broader ground surface, and this won’t happen again.

Here’s my example. I cleaned both sides obviously, and got nice and shiny again and then I cleaned, there we go. I cleaned the little bracket that comes off the strut mount here for the exact area pretty much where it lays. So we have that broader ground on there and to protect this exposed metal, we’re going to put the dielectric grease on there and they’ll protect it from corrosion in the future too. Same thing. I put it on both sides of this terminal, and then on there also. And then we’re going to bolt it down and then we’re going to finish covering it.

Tighten it down nice and tight, hand tight, nice and snug. The torques back on the Fiesta is like 115 inch pounds, if you’re in a torques backs 120 inch pounds and that’ll be plenty tight. And then we got it all full of dielectric grease where contacts and now we’re going to protect it even further with the final coat on here. And this is water resistant and all that being silicone and it’s up in the engine department. So we’re going to not get that sprayed or wash it off with the high pressure spray from car washes or whatever like that.

And just kind of cover the area, make it nice, don’t glob it on there. Something like that and it’ll protect the whole area there with a nice coat on there and that we can go try it then. All right, we got that ground fixed, battery’s charged up on this, once they had a dead battery also. Let’s see if it works. Turn the key on, proves out solid. Goes away, no dashes in the cluster, try to start it. No other errors.

Now this was another great example of not to overlook the basics. Fords usually don’t have ground issues. These are new designs that caused new issues. So it’s these newer vehicles, ironically they have more issues than the old look arounds. The ’13 and ’14 C Maxes tons of problems with grounds. I don’t know if they’re using cheaper plating on the terminals or what, but there’s just ground issues like crazy nowadays. And this is just like it’s a good design for simplicity but it should have been a wider ground base like that and some kind of protection on there to prevent this from happening with age.

But we took care of it and hopefully yours starts and runs and proves out like this one did. And if it doesn’t and you have PATS issues related to a no crank, you can make a comment down below. And if I’m on there watching, I should be able to respond and try to help you out.

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