Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Explorer Engine Swap - Installing The Upper Intake And Angle Adapter.

Now that your engine is in the engine bay, I am assuming you have everything else hooked up and are ready to get your upper intake installed.

The problem with the Explorer upper intake is that it does not have the 45 degree angle that the 94-95 Mustangs use on the 5.0L engine.  Because of this, we have to use an adapter.  This post will discuss the steps required to get the adapter to work.  I will also be pointing out where I had to make some modifications to the adapter piece.


The adapter piece requires you to do a slight modification to your upper intake.  It wants you to drill out the bottom hole on the front where the throttle body hooks up so that you can get a bolt and nut on there. 

This is great in theory.  The problems that Performance parts failed to mention is that if you are using a stock Explorer intake, you will have a problem getting the bolt up and through the hole.  Because of this I had to grind some of the aluminum away on my upper intake in order to get the bolt to go through the hole.  In all honesty, it was quite a bit of aluminum.  So be prepared for this. 

The instructions that come with the piece are pretty good in getting everything up to this point done.  What they fail to tell you is that you will need to trim off some aluminum of the angle bracket piece as well in order to get one of your plugs to have the ability to plug in.  This resulted in taking about 1/2 inch deep and about 3-4 inches long of aluminum off of this adapter because they didn't take into account that you would be reusing all of your emission controls and or stock throttle body. 

After all of this grinding everything else went pretty smoothly.  The 4 bolts that hold the adapter to the upper intake all work well.  So do the bolts that hold the throttle body on.  This is the only problem I faced when putting the upper intake together.

Some tips for this.  When removing any metal from your upper intake, make sure that you have covered all holes that go inside of your intake.  Not doing so will result in little metal chips that can get in there and eventually make their way into your intake valves.  That is not a good thing to have happen. In the event you get some metal pieces in there, you will want to vaccuum them out.  I did this using a mini shop vac that I purchased to get into the tight areas of my car when cleaning it.  It works really well.

Don't forget to torque down the upper intake bolts.  Not doing so could cause a leak and bad performance.

Once this is done you can continue to install the rest of the items on the engine and get it ready to start.

One thing I mentioned in an earlier post.  There is one part that will not fit after this conversion is done, and that is the strut tower brace.  In order to get this on you will have to either order the Ford Racing version of this or an after market brace that is made for GT40 intakes.

I hope all goes well with your installation.  The next article will be discussing setting the timing of your engine.

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