03 Explorer - What would YOU do???

[lusso64]

Hi all,

I don't own an Explorer, but my good friends and neighbors do. They recently cooked the engine, most probably caused by a stuck thermostat, but it was cooked quite thoroughly. As money is very tight (as it is for 99.9% of us I'm sure) I offered to do whatever I can for the cost of parts only. I'm not a professional mechanic but I've done my share of shade tree work and am not afraid to get my hands dirty.

A compression test was not good. 100-70-90-40-10-30 (1-6). Maybe that's an understatement

I pulled the 4-6 head and it is warped (about 0.5mm in the center under a straight edge) and has some interesting heat damage where the combustion chambers show evidence of melting and the piston face has an aluminum deposit on it. With the damage to this head, and most likely the other one, not to mention any damage to bearings due to detonation, I think the engine is toast and it will be more cost effective to just get a second hand one.

Anyway - if this were your car and money was tight, what would you do? If anyone wants pictures of the chambers - let me know and I'll email them to you.

Thanks, Dave

 

[Turdle]

pictures

You can go to
www.photobucket.com and upload them. Then just paste the links here in this thread.

 

[lusso64]

Good idea! http://s383.photobucket.com/albums/oo277/lusso64/

You can see that in chambers 5 and 6 there is a significant amount of metal missing between the valves, and the exhaust valve seat in 6 has either started to drop out, or the metal around it has melted away. Number 5 piston also shows a substantial deposit of aluminum on the surface...

Edit: The picture with the sparkplug just has the plug placed in the hole so it could be photographed - it didn't melt through to that position