I decided to change the fuel pump yesterday and I will never buy another Delphi product again in my entire life because of this scar it left...
I went to O'Reiley and bought one for $180. The maintenance hole definitely helped in installing the pump, but I ended up dropping the tank on one side so I could slide the pump out. That hole is too small and I wasn't about to drill with all of those fumes. The tank was 3/4 full. I couldn't run it any lower because the car would just stall out on me. The rubber exhaust handgers were easy anyway, and the heat shield were not complicated. Dropping the tank was not difficult IMO, even with all the fuel in there.
The Delphi unit worked, but the problem was that the seal around where the fuel exits the pump did not work properly. Delphi actually changed the shape of the fuel outlet on top of the pump into a mushroom shape instead of a cylinder shape. The result was that the seal ended up fallin down and not doing its job properly. Did Delphi give me a seal? No. Did they tell me I had to? No. I was not about to try and do a make-shift seal because I didn't want to ever have to do this lousy job again.
So what did I end up doing? I ended up taking the sock filter off the old pump (What a useless feature!) and I cleaned out the circular filter at the bottom of the housing and just put the old pump back in. It worked better than the Delphi because the Delphi couldn't even pump enough pressure to get the car running. It still doesn't seal perfectly, but it'll do until I buy a real fuel pump from Ford. I probably could have made the Delphi work, but with that ridiculous change on such a crucial piece, I didn't feel like trusting the rest of it. No wonder Delphi is going bankrupt and it only came with a year warranty...
