Argg.........262k miles.

Chains rattle like a mother at 2100rpms + and sounds like its coming apart at idle. Sometimes very rough idle and leaking oil like a bitch on my cats


The weird thing is it drives pretty good otherwise. Cruises fine, no real change in gas mileage......... my pressing issue though is the oil leaking.........its all over the damn place. lower head bolds, exhaust manifold, cats, oil/transmission pan. UGG.

I really the thought of replacing it but can't see spending the $ to fix the oil leaks / rant.

 

With that many miles you might as well just swap the whole motor. Its probably easier than changing all the gaskets and timing chains anyway. You can get a rebuild for cheap or a salvage for cheaper.

 

262k....

WOW.

Not shocking... Well....MANY 01-02's and some 03's had timing chain tensioner and guide design issues. Apparently Ford fixed the design faw in '03/04, but things do still wear out. Keep in mind, Hondas need timing chains done by 100k. If that carried over to a Ranger, you'd be on your 3rd set of chains and preparing for your 4th... It's wear and tear. They'll need replaced someday and that someday was before yesterday for your truck.

The leaks can be many things. Front or rear main seal, valve covers, the filter itself, etc...

You're probably already looking at $3000ish to fix the problems, and you'll be left with a nearly 300k bottom end. If you intend to keep the truck, I suggest looking into a replacement engine. A newer, lower mile replacement engine. My '01 4.0 started making timing chain slap sounds at only 40k. It progressively got worse over time until I found a deal I couldn't refuse when the truck was at 110k. Timing chain job requires engine get pulled....quoted $1700 to fix. I found a 2006 4.0 with 1,000 miles on the clock for only $1,000! The water pump pulley was still painted completely black....no belt wear. Had to drive 4 hours to get the engine, but well worth it. Did the swap myself.

Locating your new engine, check out car-part.com. It's an online database of auto recyclers and their inventories, categorized by state or region. It's where I located my engine.

 

I never plan on getting rid of my Ranger for sure. I just hate to have to deal with the problem. I used to be able to wrench a job like that myself but now more, which means I got to pay someone to do it. I have found some good candidates on car-part.com. IT makes no sense to drop any more $ in the engine, although I just had to put a new AC compressor on.

On the positive my 4.0 has been problem free for 262k miles except for the items above which really came bout in the last 3 months although I has some tensioner noise before but not near as bad.