Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Modifications 3.0L Duratec 95 Contour SE 2.5 to 3.0 duratech swap

He's got a '95, guys. No IMRC, runs vacuum secondaries, also OBD-1.

bnoon - Can you please explain why the heads off of the 3.0 will not work in the contour?
I've saw on Fordcontour.org that they dropped a pre '01 3.0 in. Full swap.
Altho they did have to rewire the wiring harness in order to hook up to the 3.0 injectors.

'01 engines will work fine with a direct drop in minus the issues with the intake manifolds. Those have fairly straight forward workarounds though.
engines earlier than 00 all have a different water pump location and require an electric water pump or hybridizing the 2.5L heads so that the waterpump remains in the stock location.

I had no issues with the stock in upper and lower on the 2001 heads with secondaries. You can also just remove the butterfly plates while leaving the linkage hooked up if you didn't want secondaries in there until you can get a tune to turn it off. The offset injector has so far proved to have no issues at all, so I wouldn't even worry about doing it and using a little epoxy filler seems easy compared to all the fuel rail issues and mounting costs. Look at it as spending about 2 hours and 5 bucks to convert the heads over to the original SVT LIM versus the converting the fuel rail for an oval LIM.

So I'm assuming you want to do a 3.0 swap and want to use your 2.5L lower intake system.

This has been done multiple times by modifying the heads. The modification that needs to be performed is caused by the different placement of the fuel injectors in the different engines and by the port shape.

01+ engines (and maybe some 00s) use oval ports with injectors mounted in the center of the port.

All 2.5L engines in the contour/cougar/mystique will use a split port intake system, or dual-runner intake system with the injector mounted only in the left (primary) intake port.

So what you are doing is taking a lower intake manifold meant for a split port head and bolting it to the oval port head. The bolt holes line up but the injector mounting point in the lower intake manifold is aimed at a bit of solid metal in the head since the split port intake overlaps the oval port head port.
Additionally, the oval port injector mounting point requires a "V" shaped valley in the head to accomodate the spread of the injector spray. That valley is not overlapped and will leave a small hole that will leak air if not filled in. This is the part that needs to be filled with epoxy.

Some people take the heads and get that portion filled in with an aluminum weld by a welder, then they use a die grinder with cutting bit and shape the weld area as well as the intake holes to fit the split port intake. That is the best idea but may run you $50-$125 depending.
You still need the die grinder and to cut the stuff, but you will only spend $5 on brake parts cleaner and JB Weld Qwik epoxy to fill it yourself as well and it will be ready to work in about 10 minutes. That means no shop turnaround time. Reliability of the epoxy filler method is still 100% so far so I wouldn't worry about that.

I made a sketch that I will host in a moment.

After you make this conversion then you have just changed the engine to a 3.0 that fits your 2.5L stuff, a long-block hyrbrid if you will.

Then you will have to deal with amount of fuel that the 95 can deliver to the engine but that is something that can be dealt with later.

Sorry for the size, but this is must a quick sketch showing the stages and what you need to do. Look on my website and DemonSVTs website for some pictures of completed work. Search and you will see the image where someone had it welded.