Well it works!
The Mondeo head fits fine on the Contour engine and everything went back together with no hitches. Some of the hydraulic valve lifters rattled for a while when the engine first started because the oil had leaked out of them whilst the head wasn't being used. After a few minutes they stopped making any noise.
The big question is whether the performance is up to the Mondeo engine. As we don't have a dyno tester here to be able to produce hard figures for before and after, we have to rely on road testing. We ran the car for a couple of hours yesterday and it feels good. I'm not sure to be able to say it's as fast as the Mondeo engined car but hope to borrow one of those GTec testers to do some comparative acceleration runs. To be advised.
As I haven't changed any of the parts within the heads – I mean the Mondeo head we just fitted has all the original Mondeo parts in it – I can't offer advise on whether the changes you want to do will be compatible. As I said before the two heads look the same apart from slight differences in the shape of the face of the valve head.
