Quote:
ORIGINAL: shawnb
ok, well it must be a head gasket. called up the ford dealer, first thing he said was its a head gasket. $1200-$1500 job.
so i'm going to do it myself. just want to make sure what gaskets should i get, and bolts? use all ford parts?
this will be my first head job. how long should it take me?! anything i should look out for? i am going to buy a ford service manual, the haynes i have sucks!
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you will need MLS - multi-layer steel - gaskets. Most people here will tell you the only way you do that is get the 99-04 head gaskets. Heck I don't know, I just asked for head gasket kit from O'Reilly's for my '98and the head gaskets were Fel-Pro. Driving on them since and no problems.
Yes get new bolts (about $41 a year ago).
Even with a Haynes manual, I took pictures and drew a diagram of the hoses, lines and wires AND labeled everything. Bag your small parts, bolts and nuts.
I had a machine shop tank and surface my heads, I lapped the valves myself.
I took the hood off to make life easier for me.
I went ahead and replaced the water pump. While doing so I found the heater pipe coming off the pump to be rust frozen in place. even trying to be very careful, it broke off in the pump (at the groove for the o-ring. The new pump was cheap, but the pipe, well $105.00 at the dealership parts store!
Funny part of story: I placed a rag in the intake plenum valley to keep stuff from falling into the block. I was beginning to place everything back on and for some reason I wanted to remove and then replace the lower plenum. Yep, my rag was there! that would have been some mess in the block.
Car is running great since then. Don't know how many miles since my odo gears are broken (another reputation of these cars) but its been more than a year and I put a lot of miles daily driver 50 miles a day Mon-Fri commute.
Best of luck.
-Joe