1997 Mercury Grand Marquis LS

[Kodachrome Wolf]

damn

The '97 got sent.

My roommate had my car for weekend duty since his Town Car needs an alignment since we had just done the control arms on it. Five minutes from the house, he may have fallen asleep at the wheel and he drove off the road.








Air bags blew, the radiator support is shoved backwards, radiator broke, and the fan shroud is jammed into the fan. I think when the radiator support got shoved up, it kinked the fender and pushed it back some. Totaled? Definitely. Unrepairable? Good question. I've got to inspect the frame horns and center support closely.

I did drive it home. Not going to go through insurance because I know its a write off. If I find it's unrepairable, I'll grab my good stuff off of it, and I guess send it to the junkyard.


My roommate said he'll pay for all repairs or a replacement. If it's properly over, I think I'll go look for a '90-'91 LTD CV or Marquis. Runner up would be finding a '90-'94/'03-'04 Town Car.

[Kodachrome Wolf]

Fixed the leaky oil filter adapter gasket on the '97.







Decided I'd do it. Not terrible, just greasy from the long term weep the adapter had prior. Used a FelPro gasket that looked almost identical to the original Ford gasket, so I guess it should be good for a while.

[Kodachrome Wolf]

I guess if you get almost 27 years and 244K out of the oil filter adapter gasket before it gets seriously leaky, I guess you're doing alright.



Honestly kinda at a crossroads where either I'm gonna do it, or if I opt to take it up the street to my favorite independent shop and have them do the dirty work and eat the labor. It's not a hard job, but honestly I'm just kinda curious how much they'd want to fix it. I've got to go up there Monday anyway since my roommate's Town Car is going in for upper control arms, so I might inquire when I go to pick him up.

[Kodachrome Wolf]

11 years and 130K miles later, you get to experience another average 4.6 moment...




My nPI intake finally started checking out, so Nick and I took care of doing a PI intake swap on my car since he had one handy. Time was taken to do the swap the right way, so the car did get a new heater pipe, receiving nipple, and water pump. Probably for the best we took care of the intake as soon as we did as mine was a disaster in hiding.

I had noticed the intake had a small crack near the rear heater nipple and it was resulting in a slow weep.


When I tried to remove the heater hose from the barb, the whole darn thing yanked out with virtually no resistance at that point.
Glad it didn't blow that port out while going down the road, since that would have easily complicated things.


The forward coolant ports were also almost to the point of gasket wall failure.



Car runs good post swap. You can definitely tell it pulls a bit better at the upper RPMs, or at least as good as an 243K mile nPI engine can do anyway. I am waiting on a new set of hood supports, as the passenger side one just opted to fail while we were working on this job and proceeded to start hissing and puking oil everywhere.

[Kodachrome Wolf]

Closing in on 243K! Definitely not putting miles on this car as much as I used to.

Nick came down on Saturday and gave me a hand with swapping out my old brake booster and master cylinder. The old master cylinder was starting to weep and was affecting the booster. We fitted a NOS Ford police brake booster and a US made Wagner master cylinder. Of note, the Wagner unit had a original style fluid switch fitted to it with what I suspect was the Ford P/N just ground off. I swapped my new style switch over to it since the originals eventually leak (reason for the fused jumper harness recall) and I've already got the late style connector fitted.



He used his power brake bleeder to make that part a breeze. Used some Bosch ESI6 fluid (DOT 3/4/5.1 compatible) and everything works like it should again.

[DerekTheGreat]

I just waxed the party barge. By hand. I forgot how time consuming that is, but it sure looked good afterwards. I need stuff for the chrome bits though. What works for you guys?

[Kodachrome Wolf]

LOVE Toreador Red especially matched up to a tan interior (can't tell if yours is silver or not but that works too)!

It has the gray interior.

Looks good.

What did your exterior detail consist of?

Only the most humdrum components. I'll wash the car with whatever detergent I've got on hand, which is usually TurtleWax Zip or Meguiar's Wash & Wax. Then I apply NuFinish polish to the car followed by TurtleWax Super Hard Shell paste wax. Nothing crazy over here.

Done that for the last 11 years, and so far the clear coat has generally stayed on most of the car. The door mouldings are getting rough and have experienced weather checking, and the mirror caps are starting to show some weathering on the tops. The roof, trunk, and hood are still holding up reasonably well. The bumpers are starting to get a level of fade, but I figure that's gonna happen with plastic versus metal painted components and long term UV exposure. Not to be overly inflated, but I don't usually see too many Aeros with good paint anymore, so I figure I'm doing something right to slow down the inevitable decay.

If I can find a decent set of '92-'97 police door mouldings, I'll probably just swap to those and see if there's any way to refinish the stock stuff later on.

[gadget73]

sounds like the same sort of failure the CD player in my truck suffered. It wouldn't shut off because it was convinced a disc needed to eject and the motor just ran endlessly. 2-3 days and the battery would be flat, and when I pulled the radio it was hot to the touch. Opened it and unplugged the CD mechanism, problem gone. Apparently its a thing for that type radio. It has an aux input that works and I never play CDs anyway so I really don't care.

[87gtVIC]

Looks good.

What did your exterior detail consist of?

[friskyfrankie]

LOVE Toreador Red especially matched up to a tan interior (can't tell if yours is silver or not but that works too)!

[massacre]

I generally like the first gen Aeros better than the second gens, but yours has always been an exception along with drock.

[Kodachrome Wolf]

Got exterior and interior detailing done today.



Car is definitely not perfect, but I guess for a 25 year old car with 238K it still looks fine from 10 feet, so it still has that going for it.

Changed the oil, checked other fluid levels, checked the lights, and guess I just need to check the tire air pressures. Otherwise its about as ready as it can be for Monday. Definitely needs a good run, the valve stems must be getting a touch hard/tired, it chuffed some blue smoke when I fired it up. I've only driven it about 3000 miles since last year's oil change, which is way down from its original 8-10K a year.

[Kodachrome Wolf]

Mmm, need to dust this thread off a bit.

Got back to working on the '97 to address some stuff prior heading for Texas for a week at the end of the month. Been dealing with a significant battery draw with the key off for a few months. The battery could be pulled flat within 48 hours. I fitted an underhood 2 amp Noco maintainer as a stop gap, however it could never fully charge/maintain the battery given the rate of drain. I got my hands on a set of inductive ammeters, and was able to properly measure draw. Key off was resulting in a draw of roughly 5 to 6 amps.

I'd become very suspicious of my radio since it had started displaying a tape error on startup every time within the last few months. The tape deck had a weak ejection function and was absolutely borked after a friend tried to put one of those silly aux tape things into it and it required some careful removal, but that had been several years ago. I guess something finally just got funny with the assembly. When I pulled the radio, the ambient temperature in the cabin of the car was maybe 70 degrees, but the radio assembly itself was much warmer than that to the touch.

I swapped in a replacement unit from a Continental, and the measured draw is back down to an appropriate level where the car is not draining down without maintainer intervention. Only quirk with the Continental unit is it features a delayed exit function that was tied into a multiplex network that our cars never had. Essentially the radio will stay on for 10 minutes unless manually turned off, so that's not a huge deal to me.


With the battery drain out of the way, I've got two ABS speed sensors I'm gonna swap in and see if that alleviates the sub-5 MPH ABS activation from the control module I resoldered. The old module was just randomly kicking the ABS pump on while the car was being driven without brake application and had a constant pump failure code. I suspect the low speed activation now may just lie with the fact there's two old sensors on one side and two new ones on the other. If that doesn't fix it, I'll just leave the fuse out and revisit that later.

Otherwise it'll be just greasing the front suspension points, checking the fluids, and giving it a good detailing. I think a long trip will do it well since it spends so much time in the garage these days.

[87gtVIC]

Looks so good.

[massacre]

Ok i was gonna say, your Aero seemed to sit a bit higher than mine ever did.