I wish whoever worked on this car before we got it, used duct tape. When I pulled the main harness, all of the injector plugs were broken. Not too much of a problem; except the mechanic who worked on the car used Permatex to keep the injector plugs on the connectors. Some of them had Permatex seep into the terminals; I was surprised the car ran as smooth as it did. Now if it were me; and I didn't want to replace the plugs; I would have joined the injector plugs and connectors with duct tape. Not as messy and would have done the same job.

As such, I got off to a slow start today. I guess all of the shenanigans yesterday wore me out as I had very little figurative gas in the tank. As such, I installed my Aunt's a/c this morning. Then gathered my work laundry and brought it down to the laundromat; been over a year since I've been able to do that. Whilst waiting for the laundry to dry; I went home and removed the driver's side header in order to get to the threaded freeze plug. Those allen bolts made the header removal easy. Tapped the freeze plug hole and threaded in the NAPA plug. Went to fill up the coolant and heard nothing dripping or pouring out underneath the car. I could hear the radiator tank filling up when I realized that I hadn't installed the coolant reservoir. Dug the old JEGS coolant tank out of the basement and cleaned it up a little. Went to install it and realized that it won't fit where I had it because the relocated pcv catch can is in the way. I saw a spot to hang it in front of the trans cooler, but I didn't have enough 3/8" hose to run; so I got what I had left of my 6AN line and ran that to the radiator; only to find that the radiator port is too big. Removed the coolant overflow reservoir and went into the basement to find anything that I can make work. Found a short length of 8AN and a reducer fitting. It was dark by the time I assembled everything; so I packed it up and covered the CV. I will see how it all fits tomorrow. Gonna eat dinner and maybe install the living room a/c.

 

Finished installing the rest of the a/c units in the house yesterday; and had enough energy afterwards to mess with the CV a little. I put up the coolant reservoir and finished filling the cooling system. It took over 3 gallons of coolant; probably more when the CV is running. It looks wonky, but it will have to do for now.

I had a light lunch and continued working on the CV. Put up the shift linkage since the header is down. Had to get the long pliers to force the rod into shift lever on the AOD. I may find the time this week to drain off the remaining WD-40 and start filling the engine with regular oil (and some Zinc additive). Still have to find a place on the engine for the battery ground; but that is pretty much it.

 

Sometime in the next few weeks, I have to pull the intake off the Explorer and address the fuel rail pressure sensor (causing the CEL) issue. I have a cleaned up intake from the junkyard and valve cover gaskets; just trying to decide if I want to paint them if I am going through the trouble of taking it all apart. I was hoping to have the Crown Vic running for this; but I will have to do without.

 

What year is your explorer?

I ask because I have the joy replacing the low and high rail pressure sensors on my 14 Escape. They are known to last around 100,000 miles on these direct injection EcoBoost engines. If you get a code for one of them, save yourself the time and replace both because the other will code not long after you fix the first.

This can be done at least on the Escape 2.0 l without removing the intake but it is a supreme p i t a.

Apologies if this is all thoroughly irrelevant

 

2005 Explorer with the 4.0L V6. Intake looks like the old 5.0 EFI intakes; minus 2 runners. The fuel rail sensor is underneath. It's probably a good time to replace the intake gaskets and pcv valve. And while I'm in there, I will install catch cans; and make sure they're in a place where they can be changed out easily. And the Explorer has 96k on the odometer. The original owners are friends of mine and they live and work in the same town. It didn't go anywhere.

 

Got a little time yesterday to work on the Crown Vic. Discovered that my header will not work with the stock shift linkage; no matter how I maneuver it. I would have to cut and weld a U-shaped rod to get it to work with the header. The Second option is to clean up the BBK shorties I had on the original engine and make the exhaust work with those. Third option is seeing if I can make an aftermarket shift linkage work on the Crown Vic. Fourth option is to just give up on the column shift and get a floor shifter from B&M or sumtin. I will have to get bucket seats at that point and an electric slider for the driver side. Any one of those alternatives is going to take time. For now, I will take the shift linkage down and put the header and the exhaust back up. Then I will go ahead and get to the 1st start. I will just have to run the engine until I figure out what to do.

 

I know I said that I wanted to get the Crown Vic running so I can work on other projects, but that is not happening. Well, the CV is not running and the inspection is coming up for the Explorer. So I went ahead and cleaned the Explorer intake inside and out a couple days ago. Actually, I cleaned the inside a few months ago when there was still snow on the driveway. Painted the intake last night. Came out decent; some spots could use more paint, but I don't feel like being bothered with the respray. Just gonna move onto the valve covers. Hopefully I will get to this exchange next weekend.

 

Spent the weekend replacing the fuel rail pressure sensor, valve covers, and the above mentioned intake manifold. First thing I did was manage to break the vacuum hose/line clip (and a little of the hose itself) when I attempted to remove it. It took me a little time to realize that unlike the fuel line clips; the vacuum line clip is a ring that you push in to release the hose/line. When I finally figured it out; it broke either from age or me fiddling with it for 15 minutes. That was the harbinger of things to come. There was a hanky hose clamp on the side of intake that I mangled and bent up another (of a different kind) on the hose right next to that. Took about a hour to remove the intake as the rear bolts (T26 btw) are extremely difficult to get to. Cleaned the intake runner flanges with Gum Cutter and went ahead to remove the valve covers. The driver side looked to be the difficult one to get out, but it wasn't that difficult. At that point it was getting dark and I should have quit, but I figured I would at least set the new valve cover down. So I installed the pcv valve without noticing that it was missing the O-ring. That resulted in breaking the plastic nub/thread in the valve cover orifice. Ran down to Autozone to get Dorman O-rings; installed the O-ring; and wrapped the pcv valve thread with Teflon tape; and crammed it into the valve cover. So that's how that went. It's tight, but I will have to check on it periodically because I don't know if the oil will cause it to pop back out. Valve cover went back on that night. Yesterday afternoon I attempted the passenger side valve cover. I immediately realized that the EGR pipe was going to be a major obstruction. I was able to remove the EGR valve; but that wasn't enough to remove the valve cover. I tried to loosen the nut on the exhaust manifold, but that wasn't budging. Watched a few YoutTube videos of people just wrestling that valve cover off. I ignored the video where a lift was used. So I took the middle road and pulled/bent the EGR pipe back and out of the way. Disconnected the fuel line; and proceeded to remove the valve cover. Cleaned the flange and slapped the new valve cover on. My clicker torque wrench decided to give me issues with the top middle valve cover bolt and would not click no matter how many times I unthreaded and rethreaded the bolt. Eventually, the bolt had enough and snapped; didn't even have that much torque on it. Not critical because that seems to be the dry crusty side of the engine and it is in the top and middle location; I don't expect much of an oil leak. As such, I am on the hunt for another torque wrench; one with the pointer. I reconnected the fuel line and a bunch of connectors; and after a bunch of vacuuming, I installed the intake............a few times as I had forgotten a few things. It was dark by the time I got most of it back together; and I was very hungry; so I left the throttle body (that I cleaned with Gum Cutter) install for later today. Hopefully it fires up and that CEL is gone.

 

I sure hope you remembered to pull those paper towels out of the intake. If not, you MAY have problems! LOL Seriously though, you're doing some good work. Don't get too frustrated at things breaking. With age and heat, most of anything that's plastic is going to need replacing.

 

I'm kinda getting used to breaking things; even on relatively low-mileage vehicles. I wish I had more time to clean out the intake runners; just wiped them out a little and slapped everything back together. Probably won't make much of a difference. It fired right up last night after work. Runs noticeably smoother now. I think that is attributed to cleaning all of the carbon out of the throttle body. That version of the 4.0 doesn't have an IAC; just the throttle blade cracked open slightly to control the idle. With that carboned up, it developed a rough idle. As such, Mom took it out for a 10 mile run. She said that the CEL is no longer on; yay!!! I ran it over to inspection this morning and they said that the I/M monitors weren't running yet; and I needed to drive it more. So I took it to work (31 miles one-way) and still don't see the CEL. If I don't see it when I get home tonight, I will drop it off for inspection tomorrow morning. Hopefully, I can start focusing on the Crown Vic again.

A couple more beauty shots LOL