Timing chain - bare minimum?

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peterwells

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This has been my experience, plus a few unrequested questions/comments. You're in an unusual situation, making some risky choices on what to fix to get it to a level where you're comfortable and able to sell the car; it's much easier to do a full job and fix it properly. So first question is the die cast with the wife, i.e. there's no way to properly fix it and keep it? Assuming that it's got to go my experience has been that these engines are pretty good, I'd get a $10 manual from eBay and only replace what is clearly worn. On our car the passenger side hydraulic chain tensioner had a blown seal, along with broken chain guides, lots of cam chain rattle on start up and some wear on camshaft journal bearings. I replaced both hydraulic tensioners and the guides, it ran fine afterwards - no noise; in total I think it was around $350 in parts (a good portion was seals, plugs, the odd hose - I went with Motorcraft parts). At that point the car had done 160k miles, with lots of waiting in school pickup lines so not hard miles but not freeway cruising.

BTW I never had any engine codes, despite broken chain guides so anything you can do to dig into the specifics of what might cause those codes is time well spent.

The FordTechMakuloco YouTube videos are very good.

Good luck,

Peter
 

proftomda

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With 315,000 on the chassis and engine mileage unknown, its too worn out to bother. Just sell it as is and move on. It will be hard sale with those real miles. Now if it had 106,000 miles it would be totally worth it to invest the time and money.
 

Frank Wilson

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If the body has 315 k on it but is in good shape and little rust why not get a compression test and oil analysis done.?
If those three things check out, and you do the timing work yourself, you could come out ahead.
Although, I would also dump the tran fluid and send that to Blackstone too.
 
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mkbruin

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If the body has 315 k on it but is in good shape and little rust why not get a compression test and oil analysis done.?
If those three things check out, and you do the timing work yourself, you could come out ahead.
Although, I would also dump the tran fluid and send that to Blackstone too.

Zero rust. None. The truck doesn't look like it has 300k on it. Also, new trans filter and fluid last summer, so that analysis won't show much of anything.
 
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