MY CHEAP C6 CORVETTE IS UNFIXABLE DESTROYED BY DIRT

On today's episode of WatchJRGO, we are back in the shop with my 2006 C6 Corvette, the cheapest one ever sold, and also my first kind of fast car that I bought when I was 24. And since then, it's had 180,000 more miles put on it, and it's been driven down a dirt road every day of its life. And the problems the dirt roads have created have been unending. What is going on, guys? I am WatchJRGO, and today, like I said, we are back with my cheap Corvette that's looking a little bit dirty because it sat outside for a night, unfortunately. We need to go wash this thing, but hey, the transformation of this car from when we picked it up to now is unbelievable. As you guys saw in the last video on this, I was literally scooping pounds and pounds of dirt out of that back bumper into the trash can, which is great because now that back bumper will drain again, so things won't rust out. I had to replace so many fasteners putting that wheel well liner back on. It was ridiculous. They all literally rusted in place and broke. We also fixed the EVAP system in that last video because you couldn't put gas in this thing. Now you can put gas in quite a bit faster. It's still not perfect. I think it just needs used, which would be ideal. And now the EVAP system vents properly, and we got the check engine light cleared, so we're making good progress on rebuilding this Corvette, bringing it back to life. But now we have another issue. First of all, we saw in the last video the front tires are on backwards. Now it should be easy. It's just a rotation of the tires, but they are pointing in the wrong direction, which means in high water, this thing will hydroplane and you will die. So we are going to fix that today. And also I found another massive problem caused by the dirt, and we have no cooling fans now. In the last video, the cooling fans broke. So the front wheel problem is very simple to solve. You can see it says rotation that way, which is reverse. So these need to be flipped onto opposite sides of the car, and then the front wheels will be going in the right order. Now the front wheels are trash, and I think I have a solution coming for that as well. You can see all the chrome's delaminating, and all the tires are pretty much gone. They have big rock chunks taken out of the back tires there. So it needs tires, and those tires are certainly on the to-do list. But today's to-do list is different. It includes figuring out why the cooling fans won't turn on anymore, and I think the ECU can see the module. So it seems like we've got a weird problem there, and also why does it have a random misfire every once in a while? And I think that was pretty easy to find. Also, I think something weird started happening. I'm pretty sure the door antennas started working again. It wasn't working the entire time, and maybe just cleaning it, and cleaning it, and cleaning it made it work. The passive locking system on the C6 Corvette is controlled by a module called the RCDLR, if I remember right. And I don't quite remember where that module is. I think it's sitting right in the middle of the dash. I think it's the end of the world if you have to change it. I'm pretty sure it's right here, and you have to remove the entire dash from the car if that module needs changed. But there's also a chance that it's right here in the waterfall. But either way, there's an antenna for each door, and that antenna sits right inside here. There's antenna one on the driver's side, antenna two on the passenger side, and we had codes when we scanned it for both antennas failing. So every time I walked up to the car, you'd have to dig your keys out of your pocket and hit unlock. But then the moment you walked away from it, eight seconds later it would lock. So you'd literally be turning around for like three seconds and close the door and the car would lock. So it was honestly, it was a really big problem. And I think the problem has sort of resolved itself. So I'm really, really excited about that. It seems like it's working with both keys now, magically. So let's scan it again today and see if the RCDLR codes have disappeared. Also that manages the TPMS too. It's like the radio control module, and everything on the car, including the remotes, the passive locking, and the TPMS sensors all feed into that module. And TPMS was working fine, but honestly people say that module failing inside is common. The solder joints go bad, but it's working. So we fixed it, right? The next problem, the reason we were opening the door here is because I think I might've found the misfire. I showed this to you guys at the end of the last video. Under the covers, everything is wrecked. The valve covers, wrecked. The coil packs, wrecked. Everything is just completely covered in dirt. So the first thing we're going to do today, this is weird. What made you think that needed two pieces of hose? That's actually just insanity there, going to the spider for the steam recovery there. But this seems like a problem. Why is there a cap over the PCV port? And that's kind of what I was thinking, is that it's a PCV issue because the rear main failed. And we've known the rear main seal has been leaking since the very first video. And now that I see that there is a cap on that port, maybe it's supposed to have it, but the PCV for the LS is literally part of the valve covers. It's all integrated. And if there's nowhere for crankcase air, okay, here's the PCV and it's running back. I think it runs back and goes in, but also I kind of think there should be a breather or something over on that other one. I'm going to have to look that up, but first let's go clean up this engine bay so we can actually work on the coils, get all this trash out of here. We're going to scrub it down completely at the car wash until this thing is brand new looking. And then that should help us find whatever's going on with these misfires. But I would guess that there's like water or something in one of the coil pack connectors. You really don't know. That dirt could be holding moisture in. It could be causing problems with contacts to coils. There could be a failing plug wire. There are so many options for what could be going wrong with this in the ignition system. We got to chase that down. So anyway, today's to-do list is fix this first, rotate those tires, and figure out what's going on with that cooling fan module, because I would love to be able to use the AC again. I've been driving it around with no AC because if you turn it on, it overheats quickly. If you leave it off, it never even gets hot. It never goes over 220. I think it sits at 219 if you keep the AC off, and then 235 if you kick the AC on. I don't know if you guys can see this misfire on camera, but it's so slight. Just every once in a while, not even in the last five seconds I've been talking, you just get that, just a little bit, just a little, little bit. But hey, we're going to get this thing in the car wash right now, get it cleaned up, and then do some ignition troubleshooting to see if we can figure this out. If nothing else, I bet it needs spark plugs. It's probably got 100,000 miles on spark plugs. Well, a little bit of my favorite engine degreaser, not sponsored as always. You guys know I've been using that since I was a little kid, and it works better than anything. The engine looks reasonable. Not perfect. I said reasonable. We got dirt back there a little bit, and just, you know, the valve covers need to come off. Honestly, I wouldn't doubt it if it needed valve cover gaskets, but there's no leaks. Unfortunately, there's no oil all over the place. I mean, fortunately as well, but I think the one O-ring, ooh, I didn't get enough in there. I needed a little more wash right there and a little bit more right there, but other than that, I mean, I think it needs this O-ring replaced. Seems like that might be a bit of a problem, and that's probably it. We got so much mud out of there. There were literal rivers of mud pouring out down the intake here, so that can't be good for anything, but I'm telling you, it looks a lot better. You guys just saw the before and after. You saw it better than I did. I think it's pretty solid, so let's go get a set of plugs and wires to chase down that issue, and then we'll get in here, get it up on the lift, and work on that fan module that's underneath the car here. So let's start with an O'Reilly's run. I don't want to put coils on it yet. Coils on this thing are kind of expensive. They're like $60 each times eight, so it does add up. I'm going to do plugs and wires to start with, and we will go from there, but it's going to be easy to work on now, and we're going to let it cool down while we make that O'Reilly's run. All right, guys, we are here at O'Reilly's to pick up at least spark plugs in that fan controller. I pre-ordered the fan controller just for testing, but we're going to get in there with the oscilloscope, I hope, and actually make sure we have PWM control to the fan controller first. All right, thanks, brother. No problem. This might be the biggest total of the year and the smallest amount of stuff. I know, right? It's crazy. All right, you two, later. All right, guys, we got spark plugs, wires, AC Delco wires, lifetime warranty somehow. I don't even know how O'Reilly's is putting a lifetime warranty on the Delcos, and the race plugs. All right, let's get this absolute precious cargo home and go fix this car. All right, guys, we are back at the shop with our much, much cleaner LS2 and spark plugs, spark plug wires, and a fan controller, which I hope we don't need, but we're going to find out here in just a moment. But over here, it's time to start out by seeing what at least one of the spark plugs looks like. So let's pop one of these guys off, maybe the easiest one there is to do. I'd say this one's probably the easiest, and find out just how bad it is. Now, this exhaust is going to be hot, I have no doubt. So I put my gloves on, and that probably isn't enough. Oh, somebody put the AC Delco wires on it, which is awesome. I'm not upset about that at all. But as always, the spark plug wires are baked onto the spark plugs here. Ah, there we go, we got one. Okay, so pretty dirty. Not the end of the world, but pretty dirty. I will say the first spark plug here is coming out much easier than I actually expected. I thought this was going to be a fight through and through, but it's unscrewing by hand after popping it loose, so that's always a good sign. So any moment now, we should be able to see the first of our spark plugs. How bad can it be? Man, these things have a lot of threads on them. Not as much as some spark plugs, but I mean, I'm telling you, that spark plug is in there. Come on, there it goes, finally. You know, those look pretty nice. Those look pretty nice to me. And you know what, they're AC Delco, there's no Corona stain, so they definitely haven't even been in here 100,000 miles. But they've been in here for a bit, and I think everyone I've ever talked to thinks the answer for the LS engine is the TR5IX. It is like the OG LS plug, and I think we put this guy back in there. I will say, I thought we were just going to see terrible plugs, but these are in okay shape, and the gap looks correct on both of them. Well, I checked the gap on this plug that I pulled, and it's a little beyond 044. And these ones are 040, which is the recommended gap for the LS. So let's start putting our iridiums in this thing. These are the, like I said, NGK iridium. And while we're at it, we're going to change these spark plug wires to new AC Delco ones. So, oh man, these have been in here for a while. They're full of dirt. I'm going to try to clean all the dirt off of these heat shields as well, and we're just going to try to make this entire setup very, very nice. So I'm going to throw you guys on the time-lapse right now. I'm sure you don't need to see me pulling spark plug wires, and it takes quite a while to get each one of these off and putting in new spark plugs. It's a pretty simple job here. The only one that's tough on this engine, if I remember right, is the driver's side rear. Different on the old ones, it's actually, none of them are bad on this engine. You can really get to every single one of them on this engine. The old LTs and some of the LSs are nearly impossible, but the Corvette is the best of the best. This might be the hardest one because you have to have swivels to get to the front. But with that said, I'm going to pull this thing apart right now, and let's get her knocked out as quickly as possible. Then we can get the Corvette in the air and work on more important projects like keeping the air conditioner cold. That's the most important project in the summer. First of all, guys, who knew that spark plug wires would be such a transformation under the hood? Whoever put them on last time didn't really do a good job. They were all pointing different directions, and there was extra tension on the wires and stuff. You're supposed to have just a hair of turd like that so that it flows nicely down and the spark plug wires aren't being pulled on or anything. But also, speaking of the spark plug wires, I opened the box and I was like, huh, that smells different. Then I did one of these, and these smell delicious. Absolutely. I don't know what that smell is, but you guys know it's like that purple smelling plastic. You've smelled it before. Absolutely delicious, whatever it is. We're going to go ahead and put the last of the heat shields on this last plug wire here. This is the only thing we have to do still. Oops, tough to jump in here without gloves. The exhaust is still hot. I don't want you guys thinking it cooled off or anything like that. That exhaust is still hot. Then go ahead and put on our last plug wire, and we are done. Nice. All right. Now we can put all the engine covers back on, but first let's start this thing up and make sure that it runs on all eight cylinders. That would be ideal. Hopefully it runs like a new car when we start this thing up. Oh, guys, it's so much better. Not even a blip out of this old engine. Oh, now we have a check gas cap. I better check it. Maybe I left it loose. You know, before I put the valve cover covers back on, I feel like we should still look into that PCB issue because I do think that that might be what happened to the rear main seal on this. It might've just happened because it has a billion miles on it, but there is a chance that there was crankcase pressure and that helped push out that rear main seal. Kind of weird though, the front main's perfect, and I'd say a lot of times you would see both of them going if that was the case. So let's get under this thing and start figuring out what's going on with that fan issue. The cooling fan is very high priority. Also, here's all the spark plugs that came out of it. None of them were bad, bad or anything like that, but you know, they'd been run for quite a while. So I'm happy we got those swapped out either way. And like I said, what were these coming in at? Oh, four, four or something. Oh, four, four was passing pretty easy on some of them. Uh, Oh four. Oh, was passing super easy, straight through. No problem at all. So, uh, I do think these were worn and the new ones should help out a lot guys while we've got the car at the perfect height. Let's go ahead and swap out the wheels. Cause it will only take a second. And then we'll go ahead and lift it all the way up and start checking out that fan module under there. And you know, I did try to kind of get that fan module off before and I had no luck. So today we have to succeed where a few have succeeded before, or at least I haven't. Wow. Oh man. Did we need to go drive this with the lug nuts loose? What on earth? Who would have guessed the wheels? You know what? We all should have guessed the wheels were going to be stuck on. Unbelievable. Got it. Not one to give up easily. That's for sure. All right. Let's take a look at these tread patterns that are clearly supposed to rotate that direction. So a little side switch and we should be good to go. But while I'm here, I'm going to get a wire brush on this hub because it is packed with dirt and I do want these to be serviceable. Ooh, inside wear is pretty nasty on these. Just a little, it's worse than the outside wear. That's for sure. Well, shout out to the wheel on the other side. This one came right off. No problem at all. So let me get these cleaned up. I wish I had that. They make a tool for this now that it's like a wire brush that's sized for hubs and you can just run it on there and have it perfect in two seconds, but I don't have that. So we'll give it a little elbow grease and we should be ready to rock. Really not sure what's going on with this wire brush or where I got it. Oh, task force. That's Home Depot, isn't it? Pretty sure. Oh, it's split. I was like, I really don't know what's up with this wire brush, but every time I use it, the wires are like flying out in mass, flying everywhere. One just hit me in the eye. So that's why I, the only reason I mentioned it is because one hit me in the eye, but apparently this wire brush opened up and split. Never seen that before. Well, need some Harbor Freight trips because I need new wire brushes. This is not doing too much, but it's getting the edges of it like I want it. Okay. The wheel shouldn't get stuck on it anymore. I'll put some grease on here and let's get this going. No longer will wheels be getting stuck on the Corvette here. Never again. We'll put all this extra grease over here on the other side. Okay. Repeat on the other side onto the fan controller. All right guys, here's the deal. We have already done quite a bit of testing on this fan here. And what we did last time was take the tablet and try to command the fan on. And I mean, we verified that it does physically move. I don't think it's a bad motor, but we haven't tried powering the motor itself. And we also haven't tried putting the oscilloscope on the PWM control lead. Now it's pretty easy to figure out what's what up underneath here. These two right here are the power to the fan. These two right here are the power into the module. And the little one right here is PWM control from ECU. And we could put the oscilloscope on here and just see what's going on. Or option two, we could just slap a new fan control module on. And to test it with a new fan control module, you don't even have to undo any screws. You literally just pull the clip off the bottom here and plug in the new one. O'Reilly's had one in stock, so I picked it up. And I think the best thing to do is just plug in a new fan control module and then command it on. And if it doesn't work, then we know we have problems with the ECU controlling the module or power. But we did test power already. We know we have good power. I don't know if it's getting down to the module, but we know we have good power either way. So let's go ahead and pop that connector off there, plug in a new module, and see if that fixes it. If it doesn't, we can do more troubleshooting. But I kind of have a feeling it's a bad FCM. Here are our spark plug wires and the plugs. Like I said, those are the plugs we put in. Here are the wires. They are the 9748RR. Lifetime warranty too, which is awesome. And over here, we have our fan control module from Dorman, 902437. Yep, that's a bunch of big connectors. Okay, with that said, I'm going to open this one up and we're going to try to get the connector off of here. This connector might be the end of your life. I know that it is. I tried getting it off already and I had zero luck. So we're going to get in here with a screwdriver and try to pry it back and forth to see if it'll come loose. Well, guys, there's a chance that this actually just needs a new wiring harness for the fan control module. I'm not sure yet, but the connector will not come off of the old FCM. But while I was trying to wiggle it off, the PWM wire here just slid out. So I took some little needle nose, grabbed it, and shoved it back up in there. And I'm hoping that maybe that wire was actually just loose. And now that it's connected again, it'll turn on. So let's hook the tablet up to this thing and see if we've got fan control. Cooling fan. Let's go. Time for some testing. Increase 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 percent. And the fan is clearly not kicking on. And this is made, right? Yeah, it's all good right here. I don't know, guys. We know we have power through here. And let's hook the oscilloscope up and see what we see. Well, here's what we've learned, guys. I don't think it actually will send the PWM signal unless it's hooked up. So now it's hooked back up and we have incomplete. So I have this kind of vampire tapped with a needle down into the actual PWM pin there. And unfortunately, over here, we don't have anything. So the divisions must be three volts or five volts. And either way, I'm not getting anything out of this. The duty cycle is lying to us. I know it says 63 percent, but that's from earlier. And we don't have any voltage, right? So we're not getting anything from the PCM over here. So I guess there's a chance there's a chance either this side of the wiring harness died or the entire PCM died or it's still just a bad fan control module. But either way, I still cannot get that connector out of the fan control module. But either way, I think the next step here is unhook this connector here and just run a bunch of alligator clips from these pins over to that new fan control module and see if it starts magically responding. Because then we could just measure voltage and we would know what's up. Well, guys, I may be at a loss here. I may need you to tell me what's going on in the comments. If you know what fan control circuit status incomplete means, please let me know. Because now we have this completely wired to this new fan control module. I have a load on it. It's a five watt load. It's no motor, but it's enough that it should think there's a load. And if we hit increase, this should get brighter and brighter and brighter and brighter. But instead, nothing happens. And I heard this thing come on when I connected 12 volts. So I obviously added power last and it senses the module immediately. It went from short ground open to incomplete. And now, of course, we have nothing from it. And this is the brand new one. So it's wired straight through. Nothing I can do. Never saw anything on the meter. Never saw the light bulb come on. I really don't understand why it continuously is saying fan control circuit incomplete because it is very, very complete. And it knows it's got power and it is sensing the control unit. That's what I really don't get. And this isn't canned data or anything. It has to be simple PWM control. Also, we know it's that because people sell aftermarket controllers that can go between those harnesses and force the fans on. So that is a pretty common mod for these, for people that want them to run cooler, like at the racetrack and stuff like that. It's really probably a dumb idea. It's from the generation where everybody wanted their engines to be cooler all the time because they were iron blocks. But aluminum stuff is very efficient when there's a bunch of heat in the engine. So I definitely don't think you need those aftermarket fan controllers. I wish I had one at the moment for troubleshooting reasons. But I don't get it. Why is the fan control circuit incomplete? There's nothing wrong with it. Everything's hooked up. Brand new fan controller. Ooh, I found the final test guys. So a little bit of Googling showed the GM recommended setting the cooling fan commanded state to 90%, hooking your meter up to it and then seeing if you had 0.45 volts. And you know, we checked on the oscilloscope and I had nothing. So I was like, well, I mean, I guess maybe I'm just doing it wrong, but we have no voltage. We are hooked up to the PWM output right now and we do not have 0.45 volts. And let's make sure, let's go all the way to the battery here. 0.01. I guess that's something. I backed the commanded state down to 40% and it's exactly the same. So we are getting nothing from this. And I think, I think you can probe this without having the control module in circuit. I mean, it's all there and plugged in, but now it doesn't have command, right? So let's try it both ways. We'll try it both ways just for, you know, fun. Well, I've never seen this before and the oscilloscope didn't reflect this either. It definitely did not say this is what was happening, but I have 12 volts coming back. I guess that's 12 volts coming back from the control unit. All right, let's, let's unhook the control unit. Now we're back to incomplete, right? And now let's probe this one more time. Okay. Now we have nothing. What on earth is going on? If the control unit's in circuit, you get 12 volts back through the control pin. I don't get it. I really don't get it. Maybe this was never working before. Well, for some reason there's either feedback, which I don't think there is, or something weird is happening when you hook this thing up the way it's supposed to be hooked up. I thought we were getting somewhere, but nope, very iffy. I'm stumped for today guys, but we fixed everything else in the car. So that is it for today, guys. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to head on over to shopwatchjr.com for cool shirts, just like this, and please like, share, subscribe, do whatever you want to do. And I will talk to you next time. This has been such a mess. I've never had to spend so much time on a fan controller in my life. I really don't get it, but it seems like it's a pretty common failure on these. A lot of people say that they have issues with them. All I know is that it knows that it's connected and it's talking to it. And I mean, all of our connections are great and we can't even make it light up a light bulb. It's got a load on it. And we can't see the PWM control, which is the most annoying thing. You know what? Maybe I should put the oscilloscope on it again, but I really don't think that's what it is because it can sense that the thing's there and it must be trying to signal it. I guess I only have one pro tip for you guys. Don't drive your C6 through a bunch of dirt and mud because you will end up creating wiring issues down the road. I'm going to go do a bunch of research and we'll see what we find.