I will be replacing the thermostat this week. Can someone outline the procedure? How much coolant will I drain off and what location should I drain it? Anything in particular that might bust by stones? I will be installing a Sinister coolant filter at the same time.
Thanks in advance.

 

remove the air filter. remove the upper hose from the radiator, remove the 2 10mm bolts and there ya go.
to drain coolant over the valve on the bottom of the radiator.
I would just drain the whole thing and replace with new coolant.

 

I had four 10 mm nuts. Remove first two and then pry press switch and bracket out of the way, tight fit but can be done. Then two more nuts and the t-stat and houding came out. I used vaseline to hold the new O ring in place when re-installing.

 

On my truck there is a hardline near the thermostat housing that's in the way a little bit, not a big deal tho. Sinister kit drops right in! I think if you open the box and lay the parts sorta where the go, you can come back in 10 minutes and it will have installed it's self. Instructions did say to route the line to the back OVER the CAC tube but I went under. It looked better and couple of loose zipties will keep it away from anything sharp. The line over the radiator seemed about 3in too long also. I couldn't get it to lay where I wanted it to. The supplied worm clamps are kinda large also so I used different style on the return line up front.

Clamps:
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Routing:
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Very cool! My coolant was recently changed by Ford under the 5 yr 50k engine warranty repair (EGR Cooler, Oil Cooler, engine oil\filter change due to a leaky pan gasket. I had them check for exhaust gasses in the coolant and voila! they replaced all that stuff for the $100 warranty co-pay. Now's the time to due my coolant filter.

 

You can save the coolant draining by clamping the upper radiator hose w/ a wood clamp near the thermostat housing, then removing the housing w/ it still attached to the hose. Some coolant drips, but not much.

 

^^^ cool! But I can't get my wife to mop the garage. Lol

Great luck on the coolers rattleNsmoke! I have some in my future. Sure they're gonna be a little more than that.

 

I NEVER anticipated the EGR cooler being the culprit. My engine always ran strong with low ambient ECT's and a delta of 8-10 deg....even towing. I did suspect something was wrong when I cleaned white crusty crap from around the degas bottle. It never puked on me tho and I put over 2300 miles towing my TT down and back to North Carolina last month. My warranty was aproaching the end, so I told them to check the coolaant for exhaust gasses figuring now is the time to to get the head gaskets done if need be. The gaskets were apparantly OK, but the EGR cooler was leaking....Oh well. Glad it wasn't on my dime. The only down side is I'm not gonna get an inexpensive ARP stud job done now and there goes my performance tune. Gonna stay stock now. Btw,how often should I change that coolant filter seeing papa Ford just did a coolant BG flush with the VC-9?

 

Grab the hose going into the filter with one hand and the hose leaving the filter with the other hand. When you can feel a temp. diff. it's time to change the filter. That's with the engine up to running temp. and running of course.

 

Thanks for the replies....Very much appreciated.

 

I just completed the thermostat R&R and added the Sinister kit. I took my time, the repair and mod went very smoothly. I love the blue powdercoating on the Sinister filter housing and 'T' connector. Looks real classy. My ECT stays around 193-195 now...just where it should be and my EOT-ECT delta is still 7-8 deg. Time for a cold beer.