shankster

From memory you would need: Front cover gasket kit (which should include the front crankshaft seal and an oil pump o-ring) Oil pan gasket Valve cover gasket kit (should include the grommets for the valve cover bolts) Upper and lower intake manifold gasket kit. EGR valve gasket There are also various seals you'll get into for the right side driveaxle going into the PTU and the transmission you might think about changing out. I believe there is one where the driveaxle enters the PTU and one where the PTU enters the transmission. There is also a seal where the rear driveshaft enters the rear of the PTU. If you haven't done it in a while it would also be a good opportunity to change out the PCV valve and the spark plugs. All that being said, this will be a very time consuming project for you - one I personally would not embark on for a 300k engine. Having just pulled the motor on my 2003 3.0 AWD I know it is a major task. This is the 4th motor I've ever pulled and was by far the worst, mainly due to the AWD, transverse engine and tight spaces. I bet it took 4x longer than any of the others. My advice would either be to live with the leaks until the engine finally goes bad (which can't be that much longer with those miles on it) or to find a low mile salvage motor to put in. JDM Mazda Tribute engines (with supposedly 55 to 60k miles) are out there for under $1000 shipped or you might be able to use a Duratec from other vehicles (Ford 500 etc?). I did a 03 Taurus/Sable Duratec swap into my 03 so I had to move some parts over from my old engine which wasn't too bad. One more thought - could your leak just be coming from the crankshaft seal on the front cover? I'd investigate that carefully and if so just do that seal with the motor in the car - that would be an ugly job too but the ugliness pales in comparison to pulling the motor.

I just screwed up, I just need to know how bad I bought a cherry 2003 Escape XLT AWD V6 last month with a blown motor and just dropped a "new" motor from a 2003 Sable into it. Anyway, when I mated up the engine to the tranny I forgot to match up the studs on the torque converter to the holes in the flex plate before I tightened up the engine to tranny bolts. I realized what I'd done and loosened up the tranny bolts and separated the engine from the tranny a couple of inches then turned over the engine by hand till the holes lined up and was able to get the nuts on. I definitely tweaked the flywheel by mashing it against the studs - when I looked through the hole for the starter the flex plate was pushed hard against the block. It did spring back again when I loosened things up but not sure if it went all the way back to it's original shape. So I'm wondering if I did any permanent damage to the flex plate or the torque converter? Should I pull the motor back out and install a new flex plate? That would not be fun but it would sure beat re-assembling everything and then discovering something was wrong and having to start from scratch again (probably talking 2 hours vs 20 hours). Also, can the torque converter take that kind of abuse? I must have forced it pretty hard against the transmission. I recon this is probably something someone has done in the past - just wondering if that person is out there and if they got away with this?