Ford Fanboi
I have liked the 98 Exploder, and I have enjoyed driving it for a long time now. It’s getting tired, and while it’s still plenty reliable, it’s going to have 400,000 miles on it in a month.
So I bought another one.
I like the truck. I understand it. I know all about it, and all it’s quirks, and all it’s contrivances. I want to keep driving it, forever. So i bought another one just about just like it.
The New exploder is a 99, just a year newer. Everything is the same but for the trim package, this is a limited while mine was an XLT. It has 1/4 the miles on it the 98 does, and I expect it to live a long, long time. More so, because I know more about them now.
There’s not much physical difference between the two. I’ve got a few things on the 99 to rectify, like it has a bad power antenna (easy fix) a bad door lock solenoid (part on it’s way from Ebay) and a noisy front wheel bearing (I can do them in my sleep). I’ve already fixed the radio display (they have an iffy power supply, and it desolders one of the resistors after some time) and I need to get a new jack and jack handle. (Who trades in a car, and keeps the damned jack and handle?) Otherwise, it’ has better wheels, (easier to keep clean) and better seats(the cloth always wear out, the leather, I hope, will be more durable) and a LOT fewer miles.
I was not going to be buying a new vehicle and accumulating heavy debt in this economy. I got a small personal loan to buy this (thought I could have paid cash) and I’ll be paying for it out of pocket money for two years. By the time I pay it off, Inflation will make the payment worth about 2/3 what it is now.
yeah, I’m a ford Explorer fanboi. I like it, it’s almost perfect for what I do with a vehicle, the only thing I’d change is the blasted heater, which, like all Fords, is designed to drive you out of the vehicle.
nah, I wouldn’t even change that.
21 comments Og | Uncategorized
Same way I’m a 3rd generation Escort fanboi. I’ve had three of the damn things, all with the same powertrain configuration. They’re tanks. My second one had 104,000 on it before it got totaled; if I had stored the powertrain correctly I could have put it into the 3rd one without doing a damn thing to it and run it another 100,000 miles.
Even though I really have too many cars, I can’t stomach the idea of getting rid of the one I’ve got now.
It is very common for people with Fords to own a second one… for parts.
My car of choice is the Buick Lesabre/Park Ave. Full size car, 25 MPG and plenty of get up and go.
Last Pk Ave had 320k before deer hit. Stripped that down for parts. Current Lesabre has 245k and running strong. Although michigan winters have it looking very rough.
Wish I could find a couple Chevettes to play with. Absolutely love those cars. Rear wheel drive and bone stock simple to work on.
Roger
Hale? 398,000 miles. No major malfunctions. Got anything to top that? No? I expected not.
Roger: The Chevette was a hella fun little shitbox. Don’t see too many in the wild anymore, almost extinct. Ed, I lurve the Scort platform, and I can see us doing a 24 hrs of Lemons.
Og, what do you think of the Ford E series as passenger van, I am looking at a an ’06 E150 with 89,000 fleet maintained is there any thing I should be looking for in particular and/or should I avoid it…. it pretty much the same gas mileage as the windstar/freestar…..
What engine, thomas? I’m a big fan of the 4.9 liter inline six- durable and torquey, but slow. They put the 6.0 Powerstroke in them too, or the stock 302. All are good engines except (in my mind) the V-6, and all are a purple screaming clusterfuck to get to the plugs. Still, very nice vehicles- and the towing capacity is out of this world.
I’ve got an ’05 E-350 van with the v-8. Gas mileage runs between 13 to 15 mpg regardless of the load or the speed. I bought it at 115,000 miles and now it has just over 160,000.
I put new tires on it after I got it. The only thing wrong with these things is you HAVE TO replace the ball joints every 100,000. Otherwise the express delivery guys tell me they are good for anywhere from 500,000 to 800,000 miles before you have to get rid of ’em.
On long drives, I actually prefer this thing over my F-150 pick-up or my wife’s ’04 Taurus SEL. Very comfortable, but it won’t go any faster than 86 mph and that includes going DOWN a mountain in Colorado!…
All The Best,
Frank W. James
ed: Fixed. Thanks, boss!
Had a few that would go down a cliff faster than down the road.
Ford vans of the full size variety will take a world of abuse. Hard to go wrong on them.
Aw, crap, I was fixing Ed’s omission and accidentally deleted a comment, and now I can’t get it back- sorry!!! My bad. Whoever it was- and now I’ve forgotten- the Exploder has been good to me, but if you’re thinking about replacing the Blazer, look at a Jeep. Eds is amazing, and i’m jealous. That inline six is rock hard, and it’s a great vehicle.
4.6L V8 SOHC 16V
The 4.6 Triton is one of Ford’s modular engines. The engine itself is not modular, the machinery on the assenbly line can change from manufacturing one engine to another in short order. The engines themselves are pretty good- overhead cam 90 degree v-8’s. The heads are aluminum, which means you MUST change the plugs carefully and on or before the reccomended intervals. I don’t know much about the empiricity of the engines, that is to say, how long they’ll last, but I know that in pre-04 engines they had troubles with bad intake manifold gaskets that were fixed in 05 and newer. If I bought one with 89k miles, the VERY FIRST thing I’d do would be to pull a total PM on it, which means plugs, wires, oil, trans fluid, coolant, brakes, brake fluid, all filters, etc.. A good shop will be able to tell you a lot about the car and the engine. As Mr James says, the front end does an awful lot of work on that vehicle, and has to be treated with care. One of the reasons is, the wheels on the front of a Ford Van are pushed out way in front of the engine, where the wheels on almost everything else are even with, or just slightly behind the weight of the engine. This makes the front end wandery with even the tiniest hint of wear on a van, where the balljoints on a pickup or car can be almost ready to fall off, and it will still track moderately well at highway speeds.
I love full sized ford vans, and for hauling or dragging a family around, they just about can’t be beat. You can also haul trailers that would make a normal pickup choke.
If this was fleet owned, the good news is the maintenance is usually done on schedule (Depending on the fleet!!) but the bad news is any number of people may have been driving it, who didn’t give a damn about it.
If you’re buying this from an auction company, or from a lot, see if they have a service contract available. it won’t be cheap, but it will save your butt if you have any major repairs. You can also buy a service contract (Like a new car warranty, it works like buying breakdown insurance for your used car)
It was me on the blazer. Looks to be a unlatched rear hatch that fired the lights and drained the battery.
I used to have a car lot and I had a jeep once that let water in. Not out, just in. Kinda soured me on the whole concept. The inline six, 4 leter, is a good engine. But almost any inline six is pretty good regardless of make. At least anything north of 65 or so.
Some time ask me about intrepids. Talk about a clueless public.
Oh, lord, I’ve worked on those buggers, lose the head gaskets and dump coolant into the pan, hose up the journals, contaminate the system, Chrysler corp couldn’t line up the body panels worth a damn, and the whole suspension is apparently made of silly putty and popsicle sticks. but “Cab forward” changed everything. Right.
Had a ’95 Explorer for almost 12 years. Traded it for a Trail Blazer. Big mistake. Now own a 2010 Explorer. Much happier.
Happy camper dance.
Og and Ed,
You guys gave some solid recommendations for the Explorer and the Escort. Is there a model year at which either (or both) changed so much that it is no longer the same trustworthy vehicle?
A while back, Og, you wrote of Ford pickups of a certain age (80’s, I think) that had a body design that wasn’t too pretty but was very efficient. Do you remember what that was?
Thanks.
Almost any of the slab side fords are good trucks. The flair gave for too many pockets on salted roads. 95 was the first year of the flair sides. either the six or 5 liter v8 in manual should give good service for a long time.
Need to be cautious on the manual as they use a hydralic clutch to aid in actuation and you can smoke them pretty easy.
Well, the 3rd Gen Escort I like was available 1991-1996. After that they changed everything.
The basic SEFI engine (the 1.9) in that car is incredibly stout. It doesn’t make a lot of horsepower (88) but it’s got excellent torque characteristics, especially if you drive like I do and never go over about 3,000 RPM. It’s got a good solid bottom end and a few PSI of boost would turn the car into a rocket.
My second one was a 1995 bought new. At 105,000 it was totaled but I kept the drivetrain. I was going to put it into another 1995 that I bought but I stored it badly and the #3 cylinder rusted. If that had not happened, I could have stuck it right in; on teardown I saw that the cyls still had their crosshatching and I could have just re-used the clutch rather than replace it. The flywheel didn’t need resurfacing, either. (I just hit it with some 400-grit to knock off the glaze.)
I had it honed and re-ringed it, put in new bearings and I can reasonably expect to get another 100k at least out of the thing. The body will rust away before that engine dies.
The 80’s vintage Ford Trucks (What they call Generation Seven) were my favorite. The best combination for a daily driver, to me, was the inline six- 300 cubic inches. Not a lot of speed but a BUCKETLOAD of torque. You can sometimes find the old “High flow” manifold they used on these trucks when they were going to be used for dump truck or bus service, and it increases the performance a good deal.
Rock solid, not a lot of electronics to fail, or mess with, and if you could find a clean bodied one, it would be worth the restore and keep. It would easily outlive you. I would highly reccomend putting the big brakes (off the 4wd) on it.
Thanks for the replies. One of the drill rigs I worked with about 20 years ago had a Ford 300 CID industrial to run the drill. As you can imagine, it was never a problem.
wow, I wanted to work on a regular drill, I only ever worked on a cable tool rig. Come to think of it, the cable tool rig had a ford motor too.
Had to duck out for a coupla days…
The rigs I worked with were relatively small. We did geotechnical investigations and used these drills to sample soil and to construct two- to four-inch ground water monitoring wells.
The big rig with the Ford 300 deck engine was a 1964 Mobile Drill B-61 HD on an International cabover 3-axle twin-screw chassis. What a beast. We turned hollow-stem auger as deep as 200 feet. The company eventually replaced this rig with another Mobile Drill unit, this one with a Cummins 4bt deck engine. We also had a couple of smaller CME rigs (each with a Ford industrial 4-cylinder gasoline deck engine) and a little Simco top-head rig that was mounted on a Chevy 1-ton 4WD chassis. This had a Wisconsin air-cooled engine on the deck that ran a hydraulic pump that, in turn, supplied the power to the drill.
During the eleven years I worked for that company, I and my crews drilled alot of holes with those machines. Then, we filled them all in.