This is the MIL's car. She's in her 80's and the car only has 64K miles on it. She's been having some hard starting issues and has a loud whining noise in the engine compartment. She should get rid of it, but she's so used to driving this car that learning the systems on a modern model is out of the question.
The shop that used to service the car went out of business, so she took it to a new place and they quoted a new power steering pump, water pump, drive belt, plus/wires, distributer cap/rotor --- $2300 -- Ouch!!! Sometimes these shops see an older woman and just pile it on.
No biggie -- I enjoyed the nostalgia of working on a car that was half metric and half SAE. These engines were darn good and parts are cheap. I never really got into Fords, but in my younger years many of my female friends and family members seemed to gravitate to this model. Needless to say I worked on a lot of Taurus' in the 1990's.
Get the coolant and washer tanks and the alternator out of the way, then there's room to spare. It's amazing how much real estate there is compared to today's cars.
Amazing how simple these things were -- even for a FWD V6.
Water pump is toast -- the impeller ate into the front housing (and made a LOT of noise)
look at that groove that was ground out.
Mating surfaces looked bad and they took a lot of work to get cleaned up.
Here's an interesting point; many of the waterpump bolts go directly into the waterjacket. Hence they need to be gooped up with some thread sealer or gasket cement to keep them from leaking coolant.
New Ford waterpump installed (Hecho en Mexico -- thanks a lot Ford!)
Lastly I replaced the old fashioned distributor cap, rotor, wires, plugs and serpentine belt.
Plugs look pretty good for having been in the car for 22 years.
Wires and cap were another story -- they were brittle and damaged, and the cap posts were badly corroded.
The power steering pump is OK -- no noise, no leaks, but it's tired. The steering wheel has the characteristic Taurus PS pulse when going around a turn. It's very slight right now and will probably last another few years given the way my MIL drives -- very slow and less than 5 miles per week.
All-in-all a very nostalgic day. I saved the MIL a few bucks, and came to the realization this will probably be the last 20th century Taurus I'll ever work on again. beerdude
