well they might...
the real question is how does one trouble shoot anything without being able to observe it?
as for the belief it's running lean, I'm leaning the other way, because if the exhaust was lean it would be glowing red at the flange to the heads would it not? well mine is glowing after the precats, before the primary cat, more in the beginning of the y-pipe i guess you'd say.
also, when trying to get it cranked, the smell of vaporized fuel blows out of the tailpipe, and the plugs are fouling rich.
I checked the order of the wires on the coil and they are correct, now what may be wrong is the splicing of the wires from the harness to the taurus coil pack (the 2.5 one was unreliable on cold or wet days), given that that information was obtained from Dom and he seems to WANT my build to fail.
what I'm tending to think is bad o2's though. the last engine they were in did die from a trashed head gasket... sort of makes you lean to problematic exhaust parts...
as for a plugged primary cat trapping heat/unburnt fuel in the y-pipe, there seems to be plenty of exhaust pressure at the tailpipe, and it also ran rough and stumbly before I even had the flange after the y-pipe bolted to the cat... so, any other input guys?
I haven't done anything to it since I killed the battery trying to crank it and overall decided it was a piss poor idea to keep trying to run it when I couldn't really think of any other diagnostic things I could do to gather more info. wide band sure would be nice, but as of now I've got an april 9th deadline for the foreclosure of my home, and a working car sure would be nice right about now.