dave22387

I have a 2000 saleen. After i raced mine it made that noise. I thought i blew a rod but it turned out I spun a bearing. You might wanna fix that before driving cause it will only get worse. $$$ I only had to miLL the crank and put in oversized bearings.

KaMiKaZiPosTMaN

I'm only going from what happened to me. Check all the bolts on your exhast manifold (aka headers). A few months back i had an awful tapping. My first thoughts were that i bent a valve from an over rev (in an auto...no comments please =) )..anyway i took it to my local ford dealership and they took a look at it. It ended up being a broken bolt off the exhast manifold. I hope this is your problem cause it only cost me 26 bucks. Good luck bro

98 Mustang 4.6 Auto

Thanks guys. I'll check the exhaust manifold, but if it's a rod or crank bearing, I think I might just wait till the motor blows and get another one. LOL!!! I can pull one and drop in another a lot quicker than pulling the whole thing apart. I've not done anything on the bottom end of this motor so I don't even know if I can get to any of that without pulling the whole thing. I'm pretty good with the top end now, though. Just went thru the whole change out the crappy plastic intake manifold and some other stuff about 6k miles ago. The rattling sound was happening before all that though.

lucki96gt

Does it sound like this? http://media.putfile.com/strang-sound That is my car when it first started. Then afterabout 3,500miles(and 2 all out races belive it or not) and 3 oil changes every 1000miles it sounded just like this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMRPLN3nz_o And that is a spun bearing! I just replaced the whole engine.

BuzzCut

You probably have a timing chan tensioner bleeding down overnight. My 95Tbird did the same thing from 75K till I sold it at 130K. It is more annoying than anything. Changing out the tensioner is the only real good fix.

98 Mustang 4.6 Auto

I listened to the sound bites above and it doesn't sound anything like that. It's close to valve clatter but I don't think that's it. I'll look into the timing chaing thing too. It's not affecting how the car runs and it doesn't smoke or anything either. It's got to be something simple at this point. Keep the ideas coming. I'll be sure to post when I've figured it out for sure and how I fixed it. Hopefully, soon!