Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications Duratec Performance Model Year Performance Differences?

Originally posted by CLASSVT:

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Originally posted by Y2KSVT:

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I wholeheartedly believe in breaking a car in hard if you want it to run strong it's whole life. Ive done so to both the 2.5L when I bought the car new, and the 3L and both have run very strong.

Mark

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And just how long was the life of that 2.5? You gave me that same advice when I was breaking in my 3L hybrid. "Just take it out and beat the pi$$ out of it".

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I have 159,000 miles on my '96 now, and I have driven the dog snot out of it since it had about 100 miles on it. It still burns no oil (it does, however, leak about 1/2 quart over a 3000 mile change interval). I have ALWAYS changed the oil at 3000 miles. The first 117K miles were on 5W-30 standard motorcraft oil, I then used 5W-30 synthetic for two change cycles (this is when the oil leak developed, it was about a quart over 3K miles), I have since switched to 5W-30 Castrol semi-synthetic and the leak has decrased significantly.

As far as maintenance, I didn't know about the gunking issue until about 100K, and I just started doing all of the tips from the CEG site in the last 20K, having cleaned the upper/lower intake and doing the optimizing and gutting. Maybe I'm just lucky, that is if you believe in luck. I think you make your own luck.