Western Star Truck Issues And Fixes

Yes. I am not sure if you have a sleeper on your truck or not. The climate control with a sleeper truck is absolutely worthless. It seems to fight it self all day long. I have heard several Western Star techs and one factory guy from Portland tell me that the climate control system is the biggest piece of ####.

 

If you do have the climate control system and want to do some trouble shooting. Here is a way of doing it.
1. Turn fan speed to zero
2. Key on
3. Push and hold temperature up (red) button
4. System will show fault codes and by pushing red button it will go through the menu. The system will display temperatures, a/c pressures and much more.

 

The fan motor was getting louder and at one point quit completely on the last trip. That got my attention quickly when heading North in BC. Unfortunately, Nadina truck did not stock one, but James Western Star in Prince George had the whole assembly or just the motor. I figured since the truck is less than two years old it should come apart and opted to buy the motor.

The motor made it all the way North where I replaced it since the noise was getting on my nerves. Here is the part number for just the motor.





I am sure glad the truck comes with a shop and workbench in the sleeper.

 

No kidding. It was nice to be inside to work on that project.

 

Well the saga of breakdowns continues. On my last Northbound trip I lost my air dryer. The cartridge failed after it was just rebuilt by Western Star. That was fun bypassing the air dryer and figuring out a manual governor since I have a Bendix AD-9 that has the governor attached to it. Like always it was in the middle of the night in the Yukon at minus 20, the only good part is the bears are hibernating.

On the way home I found a crack in the top tank of my radiator. Whoever thought attaching a five pound piece of sheet metal to a plastic tank on the radiator should be beat with that said piece of radiator shroud.

I am having a custom all metal radiator build in Oregon and shipped to the Western Star dealer that will fix my oil pan leak too. Yes, the oil pan is leaking again. The three pieces of radiator shroud will go in the junk pile since two of the pieces are broken. When I looked for numbers on the radiator I saw that one of the wires to the city horn had corroded off as well. Last trip I had to replace the bracket on the city horn since that had broken off.

The truck has been in service for about 20 month and it is just falling to pieces and now the wiring issues seem to get worse too. I had to rewire taillights, side marker lights, city horn and heater fan motor. The lights under the bed have quit as well and I have not found the problem yet.

 

Just picked up my truck today and I have a new custom radiator built by Radiator Supply House in Sweet Home, OR. Service was great, but shipping by Postal Express was a disaster. The radiator cost $1460.00. Copper core and steel tanks.

Oil pan was replaced under warranty since it had a casting flaw that caused it to leak. Belt tensioner was also replaced under warranty.

I had the caster angle reduced by two degrees and that makes a huge difference in right comfort when hitting bumps. Replaced the original shocks with gas pressure Monroes too.

We run it on the dyno, but they had issues with the readout. I found a calculator to change traction force to torque and came up with those numbers.

650hp @ 1680rpm and 2050ft/lbs of torque
569hp @ 1208rpm and 2475ft/lbs of torque