mondeo engine failure: what to do next?

The garage looking at the car said aout £4000. Ford dealer gave a quote over the phone, ie without looking at it and said £3500

The other unknown is the labour cost to swap the engine, if I went down that route.

No, it's the 2L diesel

I have just replied to another post with some more details about engine quotes.

Thanks, Stephen.

You won't know if it's any good until it is in and fitted. If it's got hidden problems you have wasted your time and money.

they tend to be massive places that havea contract to buy anything that the particular company put their way. They tend to advertise a crash damaged, or repairable salvage and the like. various comanies advertise on ebay.

So it's a £12k car which you will only get £3.5k for.

Decent engine with 3 months warranty fitted for £1200

I'd go for it and keep the old engine.

Most breakers will remove all the ancillaries, manifolds and turbo but if you get in quick some will just let the whole lump go. We managed to get both ours with manifolds and turbos intact but less starters and alternator, the harness was cut rather than unplugged which was a bother.

AJH

That would have been my strategy too, but I gave up changing engines when the kids left home.

Changing the subject, isn't a blown engine pretty unusual on a 60 plate these days?

Modern engines require that they are kept well supplied with good oil, the old days of wait till the oil light comes on around a bend before topping up are long gone. Modern engines will clock more miles than the rest of the car before internal failure, if properly maintained and no nasties like a cracked sump from a speed hump, for example. I look after several cars with

300k on the clock without anything internal being done, but they are rare. Most cars reach the early 100k area and are scrapped while the engine is still mint, so at about 10 to 15 years old. These days often because of external things, like needing an exhaust system, a new ecu, a new turbo, even a new clutch.

Perhaps it wouldn't have blown if it had been full of oil!

Well the car went to the garage with DPF problems recently. They cured that by forcing the car to regenerate. I thought this was completely unrelated. The manager is now saying that the engine could have been burning oil and this may have fouled the DPF. I am not convinced of this. The regeneration appeared to have been successful and the engine light had gone out.

The oil leak was caused by failure of the seal around the filter housing, which is embarrassing as I changed the oil. It is true that I did have some problems getting to the filter but that was some months ago; if I had fitted it incorrectly, surely it would have failed before now? I have driven thousands of miles since then. Perhaps it was a dodgy seal, I guess I'll never know.

I forgot to say, no warning. I had driven 100 miles that day. There was no oil on the drive, so there was not a slow leak. I was driving along a dual carriageway when there was a rattle. I pressed the clutch down and the rattle stopped, I lifted the clutch and it reappeared, so I pulled over (luckily I was just approaching a junction). As I stopped the oil light flashed on. I was driving for less than a minute with the rattle. When the car was recovered there was a puddle of oil under the car (I waited 90 minutes to be recovered), so I think the seal failed very quickly. It was dark so I never saw anything from the bonnet nor the rear view mirror.

As an update, I now realise that the engine is too unhealthy to drive anywhere to part exchange, so I am going to swap the engine. You were spot on with the above.

I have found a couple of potential engines from cars with mileages about 80,000 which is pretty much what mine had done. The problem is that one breaker said his engine is a QXBA engine, whereas his computer (and my logbook) say that my engine is a TXBA. No-one knows what the difference is and whether the two can be swapped.

I have telephoned two Ford dealers and they have never heard of TXBA and QXBA. They say their computer uses registrations. First I was given promising news: cars before October 2010 used one engine, cars after October used a different one. Since my car was made in March

2010 and the donor car was an 09 plate, we were hopeful they would match.

Then the dealer tried the registrations in his computer. Mine is a "duratorq dual over head cam", whereas the donor car comes up with a different description; it just says "tdci". The breakers believe the tdci does have dual overhead cams, so are they the same? If so, why are they described differently?

A second scrap yard has another QXBA engine but does not have the full registration, so I could not look further into that.

The breakers have a Ford diesel data book and whilst that confirms that mine is TXBA and the donor is QXBA, apparently all the statistics for the engines are identical. The fuel pump is the same. The only difference that they could see in the tables is that one engine has to have the throttle held for longer for the MOT smoke test, but we don't know why.

I called Ford but they have a £1 per minute technical help line. They said their computer does not show the differences and even if engines look identical externally, there may be internal differences so they can only recommend a like for like swap and Ford never recommend using secondhand parts. So I paid for a phone call that was not very helpful.

This contradicts the breakers who think that the engines are the same and it is the ECU that creates the differences between them.

So I am scratching my head. Does anyone know what the difference between a QXBA and TXBA is and whether they can be swapped?

Thanks, Stephen.

In the early 1980s I had a company Astra. It went for a service, then I drove it around Europe on holiday - some 3,000 miles. Came back on the Dieppe-Newhaven ferry and drove to see my sister in Seaford.

In Seaford, one spark plug blew out as I was driving along!

I suspect the service garage had not tightened the plug properly - but for it then to take 3,000 miles before coming out was a bit of a surprise!

for there to be a puddle implies there was a major leak low down which continued after you stopped, since the filter is well above the sump, and faces upward.

Probably the drain plug came out ...

the other thing odd is that the seal for that type of filter is pretty well foolproof, I have put in several hundred and they always go in right, you just put the o ring in the groove of the removable bit, smear some oil on the o ring and re-fit. I have come across failures of the seal with spin on types, and the very old type of filter housing (think MGB)

Well, it might be quite trivial to check - take a look?!

Sounds very helpful to me. They were effectively saving you a wasted job.

Beware, there have been several tales of woe (BBC Watchdog etc...) against cowboys operating engine replacement extortion rackets, particularly around west London.

Can't give them away.

(Not suggesting it's the same at all but ...) That all sounds very similar to daughters Ex (who was living with us at the time). Old 1.1 Fiesta (but with a replacement engine with 35k on it) coming down the motorway from Scotland and he heard a 'bang' from the front and then the engine started to rattle and lost power. Like you he was coming to a junction so was able to pull up quickly and stop, only to find oil pouring out the bottom of the engine though a hole in the sump.

Long short, he was recovered home and I bodged the hole in the sump as it looked (at first glance) like something had gone up through it from the outside (a bit of metal on the road etc) and topped up the oil (the hole was in the 'shelf' bit so he hadn't lost much oil).

Then I started it and it ran a bit lumpy and was still rattling ... I saw oil coming though the front of the block ... ;-(

He got more than he paid for it in scrap. ;-)

Cheers, T i m