conquest

YAR!!!!!!!!!

I finally finished working on the car. Tonight was another grudge match against the engineers at Ford. It was slow at times, frustrating, but in the end I won.

I installed new transaxle oil cooler lines, which was as hard as removing the old lines, as well as installing a new fitting on the tranny because the plastic "quick connect" clip (because nobody would actually buy a "This is going to take you 45 minutes just to install this line connect") broken when I removed the old line. And "removed" is putting it politely.

Once the new lines were in, I felt OK attempting to remove the radiator. Turns out the guys at the Taurus Car Club are right, you do NOT need to take off the bumper to replace the radiator. Besides, all of the hard stuff is on the engine side. If you really wanted to make removing and installing the radiator easier you'd remove the power steering pump, the alternator, and the AC hoses. Anyway, the whole radiator part only took about an hour, and most of that was just trying to remember where all those bolts went. I only ended up with one bolt leftover, and actually, I think I know where it goes and it is non-essential.

So, now the heat works great and so far as I can tell we're not leaking coolant...a little oil and maybe a teeny bit of brake fluid (at one of my last services I was infromed of some seeping or weeping from the brake master cylinder or slave cylinder? Can't remember which. Passenger side front wheel is all I remember). So, anyhow, I started Sunday around 2:30pm and finished Tuesday at about 1:45am. All told, the radiator only took about 2 hours. Most of the remaining time was spent driving around (tonight) looking for a replacement fitting or yanking on tranny oil cooler lines (last night and some of tonight). If I were to do this again, I expect it would take me maybe 3 or 4 hours total.

And the only known casualty is my passenger side head light bulb, which was the older of the two and was probably going to go out anytime.

We still need to have the cooling system flushed, though, but I'll let JiffyLube do that in a week or two.

Right now i have so much testosterone...