Soooooooo driving down the highway at around 55MPH and all of a sudden BANG! smoke everywhere, oil everywhere... Look under the car and there's a piece of metal sticking out the bottom of my oil pan.... mileage on the engine... 99,987. Funniest part of the story is an older gentleman at a local diner this morning was telling me how my car should last another hundred thousand miles easily because I was discussing with him how I was probably going to hit 100K today. Oh the irony. Moving on though, I've decided to do a 4.2l swap finally. I'm going to begin a tear down tomorrow morning of the engine to see what is salvageable. Hopefully there was no damage to the block itself, but I'm skeptical. I have a budget of ~1000 to build/rebuild this engine. I'm really looking for your guys' help here. I've repaired EFI engines before, but have only ever built full Carb'd small block Chevy's. I'm going to need some serious walk-through as far as setting crank angle sensors and getting the timing set in general. I'll post again tomorrow with a list of what is damaged beyond repair. off the top of my head I'm going to need Pistons, rods, an oil pan and probably a new block. A 4.2l crank and lifters, valves, and pushrods to boot. I'm going to see if I can get the heads cleaned up at a local shop if there isn't any damage. Anyone selling any of this?

 

Wow that sucks! But...............I WANT PICS haha

Matthew

 

I'll throw up some pics tomorrow haha. The only thing I can possibly even imagine is this...

At around 95k a small valve tick started, but disappeared when I changed the oil again at 96k. I'm only assuming a valve snapped and junked one of my heads, got smashed by a piston which then broke at the wrist and on the down stroke the connecting rod slipped from the cylinder sleeve and just punched a hole in the oil pan... This is going to be an interesting teardown

 

best advise I can give you for that budget would be go to a junk yard and pull a 4.2L and go from there.

 

So far I'm looking at these

http://www.ebay.com/itm/FORD-4-2-v-6...#ht_500wt_1287

and this
http://www.ebay.com/itm/2000-Ford-tr...0#ht_1362wt_66

And see what I can scrounge up from my existing engine as far as intakes, accessories, etc.

 

I'm also going to build mine grass roots style, when I do. It's my understanding that you use the heads from the mustang, not the truck heads.

 

You can go either way, the physical blocks are identical, only the rotating assembly, balancer, and girdle are different. I'm going to try to use 4.2 heads because I'm pretty sure they have larger valves. and I'm also pretty sure at least one of mine are junk now. Besides the block itself, you can use everything from the mustang 3.8 as long as you stay withing the right years obviously, you'll run into difficulties trying to match 97-98 parts with 00-up parts. the earlier generation 4.2's use a water pump designed for a pump driven cooling fan so you'd need to use the stang pump and On the 4.2 block there is a sensor space that needs to be blocked off, it's used as a knock sensor on the trucks and we dont have one of those.

 

4.2 heads have the same valves, and def needs pics of this.

 

I'd take StangAnt's suggestion: 4.2L, reuse your upper/lower intakes and find another 01-04 oil pan. If you are going to have it all apart anyway, might as well port (or at least gasket match) the intakes. Maybe find a used cam (if money allows).

 

I definitely plan to gasket match the intakes and maybe the heads if I'm feeling ballsy. I already have the oil pan, picked it up at the dealership today. And I'm going to go out at some point this week to look for an engine, only problem is, I'm in the middle of a 10 inch snow storm I hate New England. Any suggestions on specs for a nice N/A cam that would complement the low end torque these 4.2's make? And about the pics haha I only got the car up on the slab and the intakes off before it started snowing and there weren't any visible signs of damage surprisingly. So you're just going to have to wait! I'm actually pretty anxious to se what exactly is protruding from my oil pan myself hahaha