New Member that needs to replace head gasket!

[spencer18]

Hello all,

I was very happy I found a forum just for ford explorers! I have zero experience with repairing explorers, installing and removing parts, or any of that. But my 1994 Ford Explorer has a blown head gasket (there is sweet smelling, white smoke bellowing from the exhaust pipe) and I want to take on the challenge of fixing this problem myself. I've read many articles telling me this isn't a DIY job for people like me with no experience, but I'm willing to learn anything I need to do this job myself and save $1,500. If anyone has any advice or tips for me before I take on this job, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your time,

Spencer

 

[Maniak]

Hello all,

I was very happy I found a forum just for ford explorers! I have zero experience with repairing explorers, installing and removing parts, or any of that. But my 1994 Ford Explorer has a blown head gasket (there is sweet smelling, white smoke bellowing from the exhaust pipe) and I want to take on the challenge of fixing this problem myself. I've read many articles telling me this isn't a DIY job for people like me with no experience, but I'm willing to learn anything I need to do this job myself and save $1,500. If anyone has any advice or tips for me before I take on this job, it would be much appreciated.

Thanks for your time,

Spencer

The first major work I ever did was the heads on our '92 explorer.

We are in Arizona so I didn't have to deal with rust. If you have rust there you are going to hate getting the exhaust off.

Since you pretty much always have to replace the heads, or at the absolute minimum get them checked out it isn't the end of the world if you break an exhaust bolt in the head..

To help things I used lots of baggies.. When I take the bolts out of something, say the A/C bracket, I put them in a baggie and if there are different length bolts I draw a diagram of where the bolts go and put an L next to the longer bolts...

That really helped me keep the bolts straight as I didn't need to be worrying about what bolt goes where as I'm trying to learn everything else.

A couple other things I remember from doing the job...

Take off the inner fenders.. That's the plastic part so you can't see the engine through the wheel well. I took that off and it made it much easier to get to the side of the engine.

Leave the fuel rail connected to the lower intake manifold. If you take it apart you get to deal with o-rings around the injectors which can be a bit of a pain.

You will need a big Torx bit set. IIRC it is t50 for the head bolts. They are torque to yield so you cannot re-use your old ones.

That is all that pops into my head at the moment.. It is do-able but you don't want to have to rush and having a 2nd body (with a 2nd set of eyes) does help..

When we did the heads it took us 12+ hours to do the work.. That was without air tools and neither of us really knew what we were doing..

~Mark

Edit: I almost forgot.. Take pictures... If you take pictures of everything before you start and then as you take things off you can figure out how something was routed of where something went by looking back at the pics.. Plus, if you have a question you have a pic to show us..