For about 3 or 4 months now, my father and I have been doing research and troubleshooting out 89' 5.0 to figure out what was wrong with it. We replaced tons of things, and each one made the problem a bit better and made it run a bit better. Finally, we replaced spark plug wires, which helped because our old wires were like wet noodles, and then we swapped out the spark plugs. I thought it would be neat to have the ford racing spark plug wires matched up to the correct cylinder (each wire has a cylinder number on it), so i started pulling out plug wires. My dad got a bit worried that we would wire it up wrong, but upon closer inspection, we noticed that we had cylinder #1 swapped with cylinder #5 or 6 on the distributor cap. So, we switched that and she runs better than she ever has. I highly suggest checking this out to ensure you have yours wired if you are having similar problems.

 

well apparently the website doesn't want to upload my pictures soooo....

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/1543/dsc06524.jpg
http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/4589/dsc06525.jpg

 

glad you guys got it figured out. simple things can really nail ya sometimes.


I wish my dad was cool with my car. He came up to visit, and didn't even want to ride in my car because "i would just try and scare him" lol

 

These problems are usually easy to trace because they start the exact time you first mix up the firing order.

 

You know you would have too lol. You did it to your girl when she was pregnant if I remember right......not on purpose though

 

lol, hell yea I would of!

I was hoping he would ride in the car so I could get a good video of him. He is pretty animated guy, so im sure he would have been cursing me out, and going ape ****, lol

I didn't push it though, he will ride in the car one day, and the longer he waits, the scarier the car will be.

(new clutch getting installed now, then hooking the 150shot up )

 

Yeah simple stuff can really get ya.

I just wanted to post up a solution to this problem because i found plenty of speculation but no concusion to the issue on other forums, including this one.