Hi, i recently bought a 2004 150 super crew with the 5.4 in it and it has 115,000 miles. the truck runs great plenty of power but when im outside of my truck whil it is running i can hear something ticking i suspect it may be an exhaust leak but im not sure. O, the top end was just rebuilt about 5,000 miles ago by the previous owner. it was done at a ford garage. any help would be appreciated. Thanks

 

Only normal ticking I can think of is the fuel injectors firing. Not normal ticking could be an exhaust manifold leak. Other than that there are numerous threads covering this topic.

 

Cam phaser noise, completely normal on 2004 5.4's. I hate it, but it seems to be normal.

 

Cam phaser is a knocking sound, not a tick. And yes it is normal.

One more thing OP, check the Flat Rate Tech link in my sig.

 

thanks, i was thinking that it is possibly the exhaust manifold, because it almost seems like its worse when i start it in the morning and right now in PA its only like 20 in the a.m. when i go to work. i replaced both camshaft sensons saturday to fix a chugging problemand it fixxed that and it runs fine.

a guy i work with mentioned something about a flap in the manifold or somehting to warm up the engine faster???? i dont know if this is true or false. but i have a 90 day warranty on the powertrain so before that is up i am going to have the shop where i bought it from look at it and if anything needs replaced i pay 100 bucks and thats it. even if it needs a a new engine, anything

 

If it was manifold, the ticking would increase under load and temp would be irrelevant. I had this and it sounded like an old farm truck with the "tick","tick","tick","tick","tick","tick", which matched the engine rpm. Fairly easy fix. Occurred at about 65k miles.