Bozidar

First off, a little history of my problems/situation

I currently have a 1988 mustang GT 5.0 HO 5 speed in WA state that I own, I am currently living in Alberta CA.
The engine is the one that came with the vehicle and has 88,000 miles on it.
First thing that went wrong with the car when I bought it 3 years ago was my distributor went out, so my father (being a ford parts manager) Told me to take it to this guy he knew in a shop to get it fixed.. Got it fixed, worked well for about 3 weeks until the distributor went out again. Turns out they put the wrong one in, and all the gearing at the very bottom of the distributor was stripped and all the metal most likely in my oil system.

Did an oil change, and got a magnet on the bottom of the oil pan to help collect any metal fragments that could possibly be in there. As well as the proper distributor for the engine.

A few months later a guy who was interested in buying my car test drove it, brought it up to about 5500, almost 6k rpm's in first gear.. A few days after that I began going through coolant like it was gas... not joking.. Big large white plooms of either oil or coolant began pouring out of my exhaust, Then as the engine warmed up and the thermostat opened, my engine would begin to chug, choke, And I would loose all my power. I drove it like this for a week before getting fed up with it and just parking it. After that I got a new car.

Now I'm looking into getting this beast running again and have two possible options that I can think of.

1)Rebuild the engine totally, bore it out, new cylander heads, the whole 9 yards.

or

2) Buy a replacement HO long block that will have either equal or slightly more power then the old one.

My goal for this project is to get the car running for daily driving once again, as well as make it reliable to drive 17 hours from WA to my current location in Alberta, And then back again. Also I plan on keeping my old block if I just end up replacing it, so that I may repair it slowly and place it back into the mustang to keep the matching engine/body vins. I'm working on about a maximum of a 3,500 to 4,000 budget and would love suggestions on any new engines that I could buy to replace my old one. I believe the one I found on jegs.com is carborated.. And mine of course at the moment is EFI. Thanks tons for the help.

My mustang and I thank you.




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mjr46

if you want a whole replacement long block =heads cam and intake and want to add a little performance ..ford racing sells crate motors ready to roll= decent option in your price range...sounds as if your engine has a blown head gasket and if it were not for the previous oil /dizzy gear issue....I'd say piece yours back together..if it were me I'd tear it apart and rebuild it myself but depends on your tech skills too

Bozidar

Yeah, a whole replacement would be probably best I think. I'm more then happy with the stock 225ish hp that the engine had when it was running well, in fact I'm going to try to keep it around that range since I live in WA. It rains there way too much.. and lots of HP + wet winding roads isnt a lot of fun :-P . I would love to tear it apart and fix it myself, but I'm a computer tekkie, never done anything with engines at all. I went to fordracing.com to look for those engines that you said they had and the cheapest I could find was about 4,700 dollars. Since I'm not near the car, or able to swap it myself I'm going to have to pay the ford dealer itself to do the swap and they're going to charge around $1800 so I gotta include that in my total cost to fix the car.

Is this engine from Jegs something that would work to replace my old one? They can just scab all the parts they need off of the old one to complete it right?

http://www.jegs.com/p/Blueprint+Engi...0002/-1/123484

brentloftis

Might I suggest that since you want to stay fairly stock that you use the money to have a shop rebuild the existing motor? Look around the yellow pages there are plenty of repair rebuild shops.