With vehicles, you never know who may be on your side. I once had a Suzuki motorcycle and when I blew the engine the third time at 10,000 miles, the dealer said my warranty was void due to abuse. I managed to get in touch with the US service representative and talked him into going to the dealer for a teardown. He found the plugged oil passages (factory machining error) that the shop had missed and I got my complete new engine.

 

There are no hard and fast rules to warranties, no matter who made the vehicle. It depends on numerous factors, dealerships included. Unfortunately, this makes it dicey as to who gets what, and basically you need to be a good negotiator and able to check your emotions at times.

My current story? On my 2003 Avalanche, the volt meter quit working recently. Cluster stepper motor failure is a known, common problem on GM trucks. Unfortunately, you have to replace the whole gauge cluster, but fortunately, this is easy to do and not terribly expensive. GM has offered extended warranty coverage for this to 7 years, 70k miles. Unfortunately, my Av has 77k miles. But, fortunately, the extended warranty came out last September (I just found out about it the other day - it's not a recall item), and my Chevy dealer's service manager agreed with me that had I known about the warranty coverage then, I would have likely been right around the 70k limit on mileage. Bottom line: my Av is going in next Saturday for the cluster replacement at no cost. The dealer's service manager said he'd be able to get it covered.

So yes, dealers / manufacturers can and do occasionally bend the rules for coverage. There's just no absolute guarantee they will.

And for the post that started this all, given that you were barely over the warranty, and got delayed due to the dealer scheduling repairs, I'd think it would be in Ford's best interest to pay for, or at least agree to some split in cost, this repair.