no CEL with mine, your missing something, check the codes to see what it is. perhaps your cats are causing the cel?!?

gut those bastards before they cost you an engine.

anyone wanna give me some free money??? Man i'm up for a huge maintence this year too. Prolly doing to the same as abwamo.
Clean the UIM and LIM.
Clean TB
Maybe replace those valves if they need replacing.
New brakes
Hopefully suspension if the money is available.
Hey here's a question advocate. How well are you with mechancial stuff. There's a svt in a junkyard and it's got lowered suspension i just dont know what type of condition it's in. It belonged to krisvt if you guys remember him. That guy that had that tree jump infront of him. Anyways i've looked at it a couple of times now and still can't decifer if it's in good or bad condition. He wants 300 for everything and that includes the springs and struts. Only thing is I dont know what else i'm going to need to put the post 98 suspension into the pre98.
I need to find a place to get my cat's gutted too. With what you told me before advocate i dont know if i want to venture to park muffler anymore. What is something i need to tell the guy inorder to get them done correctly? Do i need them to take them off or can they just do them on the car? I'm going to get some MIL's soon and it might just be the next mod cuz i dont want to have to buy a new engine. The brakes can wait i've driven them all winter in the condition there in and it's still pretty good.

wow that's a damn long post. hehehehehe sorry guys i dont usally jabber this long.

I dont know about switching to synthetic, especially with it not being too fresh of an engine. I started using mobil 1 in my SHO (which probably had dino oil its whole life - 150K) and wow, leak galore. I'd stick with a good dino oil and change it often. Synthetic will wash the engine too well and remove some of the crud holding your seals up. I learned this lesson the hard way

Switched the oil to Castrol GTX - engine is much smoother and I'm not so worried about leaking like crazy.

Then again I ran mobil 1 in my Mystique from 80-100K with no problems.

Other then what you mentioned I would clean and balance the injectors and grease up anything that will take it.

are you saying it's bad to run synthic oil?? i've been running mobil 1 for a while now and haven't noticed any thing (knock on wood) however i have heard of synthetic doing stuff like that to an engine. Is it bad to change oil back and forth?

Im not 100% on the suspension,I can't see it being too bad tho.

It depends, for the best job you should take them off, they can be done on the car but make sure they take out the 02's first and make sure they are very thourough. There are little steel wool rings in there that would spell disaster if they got sucked up into the engine.

The problem with the Contour is the cats are right in the manifolds (headers). dead cats was an easy prob to fix on the SHO.

Are they suppose to take everything out of the precats? I mean like everything!!!! With the rear one it's just a matter of unbolting the exhaust and then knockin everything out through the hole correct? But with the front they would either have to cut a hole out or hm... i'm not to sure! how did they do your front one in your mysti??? i really want to do this cuz i think it might help my car out. But i dont know what i'm suppose to tell the guys doing it. I want to make sure they dont mess up the car when they gut the cats!!!

tag your it!

I would say it's bad to go back and forth, I suggest sticking with the same oil and changing it religiously. Changing to synthetic in my high mileage may have caused me problems. But if my car had seen synthetic for most of its life it would have been no problem.

its all hit and miss and opinion anyways.

all I know is that my SHO is smoother with normal dino oil then it was with synthetic, leading me to believe it is lubing the engine better, especially the valevtrain.

nuh uh... i was on the safety spot!! your still it
I think i'll just stick to my mobil 1 it's been in the car for a while now and it's pretty good so far. I just got an oil change done 2k ago and i decided to try some motul man that stuff is expensive and i didn't even notice a difference.

are you saying 60k is too high to switch to synthetic oil, actually i only have 63,000kms on my current engine; it has no leaks "knock on wood" and i've never had to add oil between changes.
i change the engine oil every 5k's but always been afraid to switch to synthetic because of what you mentioned about leaks. Especially with the bad luck that i had with my second engine "the first and last time i used synthetic oil, didn't even make it to the first oil change and the bearings went".
if i switch to synthetic and find that i'm leaking oil, is it bad to switch back?

you spun a bearing because you changed your oil!!! OMG....... i'm scared now

no thats one of the millions things that went wrong with that engine. a lot of it was the poor rebuilding done by the mechanic, but the spun bearing was caused by sand and oil starvation. I didn't know about how bad of shape the engine was in until about a month after the install when the bearing started making noise and a mix of sand and oil came out of the engine when we drained the oil.
The engine didn't last until the first oil change so many things must've contributed to the early failure. No the oil wasn't the only cause but the was my first experience with synthetic and it scared me away. i had hard time keeping the oil level up to proper levels "i needed a liter of oil every fill up of gas", the engine leaked like a MF'er. In the mean while the mechanic wouldn't honour the warranty because i was in the middle of a lawsuite against the shop for the leaks and poor quality of work.

thats the thing... no one can safely say when it is safe to make the switch to synthetic... it all depends on the engine, how it's maintained and how the seals are...

personally at 60k I would make the switch to synthetic on a duratec... the SHO tho - nothing but Gastrol GTX (maybe even the high mileage formula) for the rest of its life.

plain and simple, use good oil and filters (k&n or OEM) and change them often!

using synthetic on my duratec I changed the k&n filter every 5k and the Mobil 1 oil every 10K. It looked brand new at 10K even

i change the oil and filter every 5k, not sure on the brand. i get my oil changes at Kentwood Ford so whatever they use, must be OEM brand.(6 prepaid changes for $100, last year it used to be 8 changes for $100) At that price why bother do it myself, almost same cost without having to worry about disposing the oil and freezing in the winter.

now all i can do is wait for the weather to warm up.

Originally posted by abwamo:

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now all i can do is wait for the weather to warm up.

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no kidding!!!