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2000 Mustang GT engine teardown progress.

9K views 19 replies 5 participants last post by  Yadkin 
#1 ·
Back in September, my Mustang started making a horrible clanking noise while I was on a road trip. When the noise got worse, I pulled over to try and save the engine. I trailered it the 4 hours home, and immediately started tearing it down to repair it. I've had some help, but mostly going it alone. Now I have some choices to make...

The first pic is the beginning. The second pic is where the car has been for a few weeks now. I just bought the harmonic balancer puller kit, so I'm going to keep moving. The goal is to get down to the lower end and see what happened. Then I'll have to choose whether to repair or replace. So, for where I'm at, I have some questions:

Should I drain and take apart the power steering system? Or just pull it to the side while digging deeper?
A friend mentioned I should have a shop depressurize and remove the AC components. Is that best?
Airbags - not needed in a race car! Again removed by Dealer?
Anything else I shouldn't do myself?

For the AC parts and airbags, are they worth selling if I don't plan on reusing them?
Thanks in advance for help, I'll try to keep everyone posted!
 

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#2 ·
If it's going to be a racecar, you don't need the airbags. The dealer doesn't have to take them out, just make sure you unhook the battery before you start. The ones on the column come out quickly, there's just screws that go in from the back side of the steering wheel, and then unplug it.

The one on the passenger's side isn't too hard, pull the glove box out and there's some nuts or bolts under there. The cover is just press fit in there, you can grab the edges and pull the whole thing out once you unplug it. Some of them I've seen do have velcro holding the cover down on the sides though. No big deal.

And you can just drain/unhook the reservoir for the power steering to the pump and leave the pump hooked up to the hardlines to the steering rack and just set it to the side.
 
#3 ·
Sounds good. Thanks for the tips. Its going to be a long project because I don't have too much money to throw at it, but it should be fun. The plan is to strip it down, get it running again, then improve it as I can.
 
#4 ·
Thought I would share an update...

I did a bit of removal in the last couple weeks. Then I had a buddy come visit for the weekend and we went to town on removing the cylinder heads. Well we got to wrenching, and drinking, and having fun talking about how we learned nothing in shop class in high school. We got so excited about removing the cylinder heads, cracked the head bolts off, and pulled the heads off... only to realize we forgot about the exhaust manifolds!

So now I have loose cylinder heads attached to the exhaust. :heha: From what I've read, my next move is to try to raise the engine off the mounts a bit to get to the exhaust manifold bolts, and to remove the final 5 head bolts fully. If that doesn't work, I'm going crazy with the hacksaw on that rusty ****!

Here's a pic of where she's at now:
 

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#5 ·
Looks like it's coming along well. You should be able to just jack the car up and undo the manifold bolts to the midpipe from under the car. Of course, doing it this way will mean that the manifolds have to come off with the heads, but that shouldn't be a problem as far as I know. If you had aftermarket headers (either shorty or LT's, that would be a different story). Good luck and keep us posted!
 
#6 ·
Looks like it's coming along well. You should be able to just jack the car up and undo the manifold bolts to the midpipe from under the car.
You make it sound so easy! Its jacked up and I've crawled around every which way and cannot get at the bolts between headers and midpipes. I barely got the top manifold bolts on the driver side off, but have no idea how to get to the bottom ones! I tried to loosen the engine mount bolts to raise it a little, but those are on there pretty good. And I don't have air tools (yet). Not sure if I could get a gun in there or not though.
 
#9 ·
So, I hacksawed the bracket on the back of the driver side head, and the oil dipstick. They were both in the way and being a pain. Here's a pic of where she is now, and then I washed her up and put her to bed for a while under her new cover.

My next move is probably drop the tranny/block with the K-member. Apparently that's the easiest route? I'll have to do more research...
 

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#10 ·
Note that it makes any difference, but knowing what I know now, I personally would never do an in car head job unless I "knew" exactly what was wrong.

When dealing with an unknown engine problem, I would pull the entire motor. It's not really that much more work and it's Soooo much easier to do a tear down on an engine stand.

The main advantage this gives that IF you find serious bottom end damage, the motor is already pulled anyway.
 
#12 ·
Yeah, I figured teardown would be easier on a stand. I have time, and was curious how things would look as I dug deeper. It's been interesting for sure.
 
#13 ·
So its been a couple months since I've touched the car much, but I have a buddy in town and we are trying to finally yank this engine. We finally got the rusty motor mounts unbolted, and even the oil pan off.
Found the problem - the rear-most passenger side piston rod has a lot (like 1/8") of play on the crank! That was causing the piston to knock the cylinder head, among other issues. We found two chunks of the timing chain guides (orange plastic things) in the oil pan also. :nono:

But now we are having trouble unbolting the flywheel bolts. Our goal is to get the block out without the tranny if we can. My buddy is trying to hold the crank with a breaker bar while I'm trying to loosen these bolts. I don't have any impact tools, so anyone have ideas to get these off? Or threads to point me to? I did a few searches but couldn't find much for an auto trans.

I'll try to post some pics tomorrow.
 
#14 ·
Good to see you still update this thread! I was just thinking about it a few days ago actually. I suggest you soak the bolts with PB blaster, I've heard it helps get the toughest nuts and bolts off. If worse comes to worse, I guess you could drill out the bolts and replace them, but don't know how practical that will be. It might also cause other damage if you don't do it right.

Looking forward to seeing some pictures. :bigthumbsup
 
#15 ·
Updates!

Got the engine out of the car!

Summary of the weekend - Assembled my new engine hoist/crane and stand. Fought the engine mounts and found removing the 3 bolts on each side attached to the engine were MUCH easier than the one on the frame (? unibody/frame).
Removed inspection cover and tried to remove nuts holding torque converter to flywheel. These were stuck, and we just stripping them, so we removed the tranny housing bolts (while tranny was supported from below and engine supported by crane) and pulled the engine with the torque converter still attached. This wasn't so bad. I made a video of the trick I used to finally get these nuts loose, check it out. I don't have impact tools, yet, so I did what I could!
...Then we realized I need to buy bolts that can hold the block while its on the stand. So it will stay hanging on the crane until at least Tuesday when stores are open again.

Here's a video of the trick I used to remove those nuts on the flywheel holding the torque converter:
http://youtu.be/elEd0Sj1CCw

Pictures from today are attached. One of which shows the damage the piston was causing hitting the cylinder head. Now the real work begins...
 

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#16 ·
You set the video to Private so no one can see it.
 
#18 ·
Nice :bigthumbsup I added it to my Mustang playlist on YouTube, I use it for small videos like that in case I need it for later on, or someone on here needs help. Keep it up, looking forward to see more from you on this project!
 
#19 ·
Tear down complete!

Finished! Well, close enough, and just with the tear down. The block is on the stand, without a crank or anything else (except a couple plugs). Next I'll have the block looked at to make sure it's still usable, and I think it should be. Then I'm researching upgrade/replace options.

Now if only I could get paid faster so this can get running sooner...
 

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