Failed fuel pump post 5/5/99 model hell

[contourguy99]

Hi need to ask an important dead fuel pump question.
I have 99 built after/from 5/5/99 and it has a different fuel pump and ford screwed up bad and didn't make the hole large enough. The fuel pump is low profile for the v6 2.5 liter SE and twist locks to the bottom of the tank. The after market ones that look similar are too tall because ford changed the part a third time and the lock ring looks to need to be removed and I can't find pump xs2u-9350-aa that is in the old housing and ford discontinued this overpriced badly designed pump. What are some accurate replacements for pump xs2u-9350-aa and the aftermarket strainers don't fit right this is so frustrating.
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[contourguy99]

I'm pretty frustrated I replaced the pump in the original housing with a oem fit delphi which are supposed to good pumps for 125 and after adding gas it burned up in 4 minutes and it's slightly shorter lthan the original! The access hole is too small. No one ever posted pictures how to clip the old pump mount out of the tank which still sounds dangerous so the current 3rd gen pump housings fit at all. Has anyone recently gone through this and have pics doing the conversion safely or tips rebuilding the housing like a pump that fits right and a proper skimmer that fits right in it?

 

[Beans]

Are you dealing with a returnless fuel system? Can you post photos?

 

[gmorrell]

There's an old thread in motor maintenance how-to about returnless fuel pump replacement, you have to be logged in to see the photos. Perhaps this will help.

http://www.contour.org/ceg-vb/forum/...mp-replacement

As the photos show, if you want to do this without dropping the fuel tank, you have to cut sheet metal.

Why Ford did this is beyond me, but they did. I was an engineer for Ford for 9 years, and the Contour/Mystique got more thoughtless, cost-saving, engineering dumb-sh*ttery built into it, than any car I've ever owned.

I did a similar thread for the replacing the pump in a '99 return fuel system, I can't find it now, and I had a bunch of nice photos hot-linked to PhotoBucket, which is now 'dead to me' unfortunately.