Page 3 - F-150

Breathing: something that is unanimously regarded as important. Trees breathe, you breathe (I hope), even cars and trucks breathe.

If you're an auto-enthusiast, you don't think too much about those first two facts, but you're always thinking about that last one. After all, an engine in its simplest form is an air pump. That means the amount of power an engine makes is largely determined by how much air it can pull in and push out. There's a reason that intakes and exhaust are often the first modifications on cars and trucks.

Intakes and exhausts aren't the only way to increase the power and efficiency of an engine. If your vehicle has forced induction, you know there are a lot of components between the outside air and the engine's cylinders that can have major effects on power. If there are two turbos in that equation, like the 3.5L EcoBoost found in the 2017+ F-150, those components are even more critical to your engine's respiration.

Ford's F-150 is a staple of jobsites around the world and apparently a staple of this blog. It seems we never run out of projects for the F-150 and with thirteen generations to choose from, it's unlikely we ever will. Our latest endeavor into the F-150 platform focuses on the 2015-2017 model-year transmission coolers.

On top of the multitude of F-150 posts living on our blog, you'll find a wealth of posts about truck transmission coolers. For some reason, truck manufacturers tend to underestimate the importance of their vehicles' transmission coolers. Stock coolers on many trucks are often too small to cool the transmission fluid during long periods of heavy towing, have some major flaw that causes catastrophic failure, or manufacturers don't include one at all.

In the case of the 2015-2017

This 2011-2014 Ford F-150 3.5L EcoBoost Catch Can Kit is now on Pre-Sale! Click here to check it out!

Gasoline direct injection (GDI) has existed for over 100 years. Since its introduction into the automotive industry in the early 1950's, GDI has had an off-and-on relationship with cars and trucks. Today, it looks like GDI is here to stay. With more and more manufacturers including GDI across their entire fleet of vehicles, we've seen massive strides in vehicle performance and efficiency. Combine those improvements in GDI with the increasing popularity of turbocharging and we're living in a time where small four- and six-cylinder engines are making more power than their eight-cylinder ancestors, all while using less fuel than some of the smallest engines of the past 50 years.

No technology is without its downfalls, however. GDI has come a long way in 50 years, with most of that innovation coming in the last 20 years. Like all technology, the exponential

This 2011-2014 Ford F-150 Aluminum Expansion Tank is now on sale! Check it out here!

With the airbox back in and all the bolts tightened down, we could step back and admire the fruits of over a year's labor. Sometimes, the best compliment a product can be given is that the owner doesn't even think about it. That's exactly what we want to hear about our 2011-2014 Ford F-150 expansion tank.

If you've been the owner of a 2011-2014 F-150 for the last year, chances are you've found a puddle of coolant under the front driver's side of your truck at least once. It's even more likely that you've found the source of that leak to be the quick-disconnect on the bottom of your stock coolant expansion tank. If I've done my job well enough, you've hopefully also heard that Mishimoto has been working on a solution to that very problem. It's been a long time coming, but we're finally ready to present that solution to the world.

Our 2011-2014 and 2015-17 Ford F-150 V8 Catch Can Kits are now available! Click here to check them out!

Close your eyes and picture an American pickup truck. You're probably imagining a Ford F-Series. And whether you know it or not, that F-Series you're picturing probably has a V8 under the hood. Like the F-Series itself, the Ford V8 is an icon of American automotive culture. Customers could have their iconic truck with an equally iconic V8 since the first F-Series truck was introduced in 1948. Over the years, the F-Series and the V8 powering it evolved. 42 years after the first F-series rolled off the assembly line, Ford introduced the Modular V8 that would power the F-150 for the next 28 years.

The 2011-2017 F-150 continues the iconic pairing of F-series and V8 into the modern

The Ford F-150 is an exceptional truck; affordable, tough, surprisingly fast and strong enough to effortlessly haul you and your payload over a mountain range. It's so exceptional that as soon as you open the hood, you will probably be disappointed.

The problem of crumbling 2011-2014 F-150 expansion tanks has reached such daunting scale that some owners are on their third tank, and others have started buying spares because there's a good chance that the stock tank will break again.

I imagine this would dull the excitement of owning an F-150; leaving your house in the morning to find that coolant has spilled all over your driveway. Or finding that your driveway is dry, but as soon as you set off, the expansion tank cracks and leaves your coolant strewn out over the next mile, because it knows

The last time we saw our 2015+ F-150, it was still equipped with the plastic bag of dinner rolls that is the stock expansion tank. Since then, we've been busy designing, prototyping, and sampling a stronger and better-looking expansion tank for all 2015+ F-150s. Before we dive into our tank and the progress we've made, let's look back at the stock tank and some of its shortcomings.

The expansion tank equipped to the 2015+ F-150 is fine enough for the average driver who spends most of their time looking at the outside of the truck or sitting in the cabin. For the enthusiast who spends hours under the hood, however, it presents a few problems. The clear plastic construction makes it easy to see how much coolant is in the tank, but it's not particularly attractive. If you've spent hours of your time washing the

What started in the late 1800s as a means of increasing the power and fuel efficiency of industrial engines, turbocharging has become abundant in every corner of automotive culture. Shortly after the first oil crisis in 1973, turbocharged vehicles grew in popularity as fuel-efficient alternatives to high-displacement engines. More than 40 years later, turbocharging has produced some of the most powerful and efficient vehicles the world has ever seen. Compared to those early vehicles, modern turbocharged systems are a complex network of piping, sensors, and heat exchangers that leverage every available ounce of technology.

A diagram of how turbochargers work from our

Modern society tends to view vanity as an unwanted trait. But, without a certain level of vanity, our lives would be dull, to say the least. People care about how something looks, whether we put a value on that appearance or not. We use our eyes to recognize danger and make critical decisions about our lives. The weight we naturally apply to our vision affects less important decisions, too. We choose our clothing, our food, our homes, largely based on how they look. If it weren't for our natural vanity, nobody would care about Lamborghinis or Ferraris. We'd all drive brown Camrys, wearing brown shirts and brown pants on our way to our brown houses.

We surround ourselves with things that we like to look at, and those things say something about us, which is why the great divide between form and function in the automotive community has always been confusing to me. On one hand, there are enthusiasts who are obsessed with function and only function. It doesn't matter how it looks as long

The Pre-Sale for this 2015-2016 Ford F-150 3.5L EcoBoost Catch Can Kit is now live! Click here to check it out!

Patience is a virtue, but sometimes, it's also a necessity. Progress often moves at its own pace in science and engineering, and all you can do is sit back and wait for a result. In the case of our 2015+ 2.7L EcoBoost catch can, results have been a long time coming.

If you've been following along with this project since the beginning, we hope you've had a great Labor Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas (or Festivus), New Year, birthday, Memorial Day, 4th of July"I think you get the point. It's been a while. In that time, we've battled check engine lights and overflowing catch cans with our 3.5L kit. What was once a humble kit to fit all 2015+ EcoBoost trucks, has become two kits, a brand-new catch can, three brackets and two sets of lines. All the while, our 2.7L kit was staying the course as planned.