January 7-8, 2006 - More Teardown (2)
With the stock k-member out of the way we had easy access to the
stock headers. Anyone that has tried to work on a DOHC 4.6
knows that the header studs are very difficult to get to with the
k-member in place. You can see in the picture below that the
studs are out in the clear.
While we working on the driver's side, we noticed some coolant
accumulating under the oil filter. We weren't sure where it
was coming from but I snapped a picture of it so I could ask someone
who would know. It's hard to see in the small picture below,
so click it and you can see what I'm talking about in the bigger
picture.
Later, one of my friends told me that the threaded stud for the oil
filter was probably loose. If you take the oil filter off
you'll notice that the stud it sits on has a hex cutout for an allen
wrench. I can't remember what size it was but I found one that
would fit, and wouldn't ya know it, the damn thing wasn't tight.
I grabbed a hex key socket and a torque wrench and I tightened it to
Ford's spec in the shop manual. I haven't seen any coolant
accumulating since.
Taking the stock manifolds off was a breeze. I had to
disconnect the EGR tubes from the driver's side manifold, which was
no big deal because I had an EGR delete kit ready to go.
Here's me tightening the EGR delete plate to the stock intake
manifold.
After we got the stock exhaust manifolds off an out of the way we
removed the stock rubber motor mounts. I purchased a set of
polyurethane motor and transmission mounts and this seemed like a
good time to install the motor mounts. We weren't sure how the
QA1 k-member was going to fit up with these new mounts. The HP
directions say to grind a knob off of the stock mounts. We
went ahead and ground the knob off of the new mount but it ended up
that we didn't need to. You can see the knob to the right of
the threaded stud in the picture below.
This picture also shows the head after I cleaned the old gasket off
of the area surrounding the exhaust ports. I used a drill with
a relatively soft wheel. It worked pretty well and after a few
minutes I had all of the old gasket removed and we were ready to
install the QA1 k-member and HP turbo headers.
