I am new to this forum and to boot, I am not very mechanically inclined. I can change the oil and most minor repairs myself but when it comes to something like this, I am completely clueless. So here is my ordeal, I hit a deer over a month ago and the passenger side corner of the truck ended up being pretty mangled, there was over $4,000 in damages in which insurance paid for, not a big deal. Three weeks ago, I got out of the body shop and I made it 6 miles out of down when I lost all oil pressure and it started knocking very loudly, it sounded like a diesel in which case it is not...I knew this wasn't good so I called the body shop where I had just got it back from and he came out with his truck and trailer and towed it to a 'mechanic he trusts'. At the same time I was supposed to be on my way to Annual Training (My 2 weeks of training for the Army National Guard) so I didn't exactly have any time to dispute anything there. I told the mechanic to fix it and through out my 2 weeks away, I was told that the camshaft wasn't advancing properly and that the actuators were gummed up with oil. He had replaced the actuators and ran cleaner through the oil to get any sludge out. Great! Or so I thought...What would have costed just a few hundred dollars is now going to cost much more because none of his approaches have resolved the issue to this point and in talking to him yesterday, the cam phasers indeed need replacing. So I called Ford today, in hopes I could still get insurance to pay for the repairs, and I asked if a collision with a deer could result in those cam phasers going bad and though it wasn't definitive either way, the lady I talked to said it is possible. So I talked to insurance and asked that they look into it further who in turn called the maechanic who said there is no way that this was a result from the hitting that deer. So here I am, I haven't had my truck in over a month, thousands of dollars in repairs I'm sure though I haven't heard any final price yet, andI don't know what to think at this point. I just bought the truck used with 78,000 miles in march and it now has 85,000 miles on it. Minnesota's lemon laws do not do me any good because it was bought 'AS IS'. Any advice would be grealty appreciated.

 

So now the mechanic is telling me I need a rebuilt engine because the timing chains are stretched out, the cams are scored who know what else is wrong. Again, I have insurance looking into it, maybe the oil pump failed or something like that due to the collision and hopefully this will be resolved.