Lesson #1: 1999 Cougar shift cable ends will not work in a 1998.5 SVT Contour. The shank diameter in the Countour cables is larger and the pitch is more "rough". I basically wasted nearly 5 hours finding this out. I woke up at 6:40 AM, was out of the house by 7:00 AM on my way to DanG's since he had a spare set of ends. I got to his house around 8:10 AM. We talked for over an hour about car stuff and what not. I left his place around 10:00 AM and got gas for the drive home. Got home around 11:15 AM. Found out that the threads where different around 11:30 AM and I was highly pissed! Looks like I will have to be changing the cable ends "in-car" now.

So, I decided to move on and remove the custom headers (for the Cougar) and replace them with the stock manifolds. I decided to gut them first, so I started on the front bank.

Lesson #2: If you are going to gut a manifold and weld the "poking" hole, do so in the horizontal position to avoid molten metal from splashing into the threads of the O2 bungs. Dumb me decided to weld them vertically, welding down onto the hole (at the bottom of the manifold). Welding came out great, but some platter fell down the chamber and managed to land in the upper O2 bung threads. Needless to say, I wasted yet another hour. I scrapped the gutted manifolds in the interest of getting the engine into the car by 5:00PM (my deadline due to an Easter Egg hunt we had planned for our son).

So, basically, I didn't start to drop in the engine until around 2:30 PM since I broke for lunch around 1:45PM. Good thing I fixed the wiring the night before!

On to the pictures:

Before, fusebox "tucked" into the fender well.



Here you can see the "shelf" that the fusebox was resting on (bottom left of picture ... angle iron welded to front frame box. The fusebox cover was removed.



Fuse box, fuse/relay cluster and the cover.



free hanging wires (plug into cluster) are pulled through, making way for the other cluster to be pulled through.



Everything through ... getting to this point took about 30 minutes.



Everything put back together ... total time roughly 45 minutes.



Another angle to show the wheel well exposure.



Engine in ... sorry, no action shots ... I worked non-stop for 2 hours to get to this poing by myself ... a lot of checking clearance and rechecking and moving wires/tubes, lowering 1/2 inch here and there ... those that have done this by themselves knows that it takes caution and a lot of double/triple checking of clearances.

It became very clearn that I was going to have clearnce issues with the oil dipstick ... a little force on the top and she fits to clear the hood.



A lot of connections left to make.



More connections to be done.



A/C compressor must be fitted, radiator & fans must be added as well.



Over all, a good days worth of work, but considering the time wasted, I should have been starting the car at this point ... that will have to wait till a future weekend. However, I now have a lot of room in the garage to start getting organized to finish building the turbo kit.

For Sale: 1997 Explorer XLT V8 AWD