Last year I bought a 96 4wd aerostar that has given me all sorts of trouble, but I did have the transmission rebuilt. AC went out and my very trustworthy mechanic quoted me a grand to fix it and said to just take my loses and get rid of it. I recently found a 97 shorty cargo for a very low price that someone just drove down to New Orleans from Seattle with no problems. It's got 125k miles but the AC is out as well. I was wondering what all parts I could switch out on these if I bought it. Can I switch my newly rebuilt 96 4wd tranny to the 97 shorty if it's bad for some reason? I also hear about blown head gaskets on these things constantly. Could that be switched out too? Should I worry about rust since its from the north? I really wanted to love my 96 but it's got so many problems. I'm very tempted to buy this 97 in hopes that it does me some good

 

I don't have any experience with the 4.0L engine but I've got 3 of the short 3.0L Aerostars. One is a '96 with 160,000 miles that needs painting. The other two are '97s. One of them is my "tool van" that I use for handyman jobs mostly at my church - it has 295,000 miles on it and runs great. My daily driver with 195,000 miles on it. All of them run great and I've never had any engine/transmission trouble with them. The '96 began stumbling badly once but cleaning the Mass Air Flow sensor with a spray can fixed that and it hasn't acted up again. Other than that, I keep up with the normal maintenance at regular intervals. The air conditioning compressors are prone to leak at the shaft seal and that's something that required replacement. It's difficult to get them in and out and connecting the lines is a real pain due to the limited space.

I don't believe you'll be able to switch anything on the 4.0L engine with the 3.0L van. I have heard the 4.0L engine has head gasket problems and transmissions are sometimes a problem.

I get good performance out of the 3.0L engine and get over 20mpg on the daily driver. The others aren't driven enough to get good figures on.

Subscribe to this Aerostar forum and follow along with all the posts as they come in or search it for items that you want to find out more about.

 

What kind of troubles does the '96 give you? And what is exactly wrong with the A/C?


If it is just the compressor, it is a VERY EASY JOB to replace. All you have to do is pull the battery, release the belt, and pull 4 bolts and you can lay the compressor in the battery box to pull the lines and the rest of the parts. The accumulator is just on the other side next to the air box and has easy access.




If the 97 is a 4.0, then some of the parts will swap, body/interior can be swapped easily, but the trans if different between the AWD and RWD.




The big thing now that is removing Aero's off the road is rust. There is not a replacement in fit and function on the market today, or even in the past 10 years. Just spending $5-$10k to restore is cheaper than spending $40k+ on a new vehicle that won't do half of what an Aero AWD can.

 

Agree with DFord. The compressor is usually the problem. If your compressor is leaking a grand sounds high. The parts total should only be about four hundred.

 

plenty of rust free aerostars in nc.at least both of mine are.

 

You've already invested in the transmission, so you don't want to start over with an unknown there.

Aside from the AC, what else is wrong with the van?

The biggest problem with the AC is all those slip-fit couplings for the refrigerant lines. They're O-ring seals held together by the pressure of their garter springs, making them susceptible to the usual vibrations of an engine. The standard system has 3 or 4 of these connectors. If you have rear AC. there are twice as many of those joints to leak from.

Mine had been leaking since they left the factory, and several years ago I did a full overhaul of the system, carefully replacing all the seals and installing aftermarket clamps to stabilize each joint. I also had to replace the compressor and accumulator, and then evacuating and recharging the system. It's been working fine since then, even though I can still detect very slow leaks. I can see this costing a few hundred dollars, including the new compressor, but a thousand seems high.

To keep the head gaskets from blowing, it's important to never allow the engine to overheat. That means keeping the cooling system properly maintained, doing a system flush every couple of years, using distilled water and a good quality antifreeze/coolant. These engines are not as durable as the old Ford v8 irons, so they will not tolerate the same levels of abuse.

 

I have parts for 96's just pm me..

 

My '97 4.0l has had both head gaskets leaking for at least 90k miles. These days I just run it unpressurized, until I can replace the heads. And I have to replace one spark plug #1 every three months and #4 every six months. Coolant to the cylinder.

The 3.0l Vulcan doesn't really have a head gasket issue, but the 4.0l do have some.

If the compressor failed catastrophically and there's "black death", the evap and condenser have to be replaced, as well as the receiver/drier and a grand is not out of line. I don't find the compressor placement in the 3.0l fun to work with, down low, but the 4.0l's compressor is a piece of cake to replace. Mine has had a shaft seal leak for two seasons, and I have a NEW compressor sitting sealed in the garage awaiting replacement, but the dual A/C is still cooling great, and there's those head gaskets waitig . . .

The A/C connector o-ring leaks on the early Aeros were alleviated on the later ones with factory-installed joint stabilizers (sheet metal springs placed over every joint). My '89 didn't have those, and I installed the plastic aftermarket stabilizing clamps instead.

I live near Seattle, and until recently we did not salt roads here in snowy weather, and we don't get more than one-two weeks of snow here anyway, so rust is generally not a problem for cars on the west side of the Cascade mountain range, unless it's used for launching boats into salt water.

 

my 3.0 has a blown head gasket.it was leaking water into the number one cylinder until i put some head gasket treatment in it.it stopped the water in the cylinder but it blows a gallon of water out of the radiator cap every fifty miles.i did try a new cap.

 

The 3.0l Vulcan does lose a HG every so often, but they're not noted for it. I've heard of a handful, in Tauruses for example, but the 4.0l Cologne is much more prevalent for HG failures. And cracked heads. And valve seat recession on the '97.

 

Those aftermarket plastic clamps for the slip joint fittings will break. I ended up putting hose clamps around them. I also got an aluminum clamp, but it turned out it crimped the connector so that it would no longer come apart. Fortunately, it still seals.

I've heard the opposite about heads and leaks; that the Vulcan was more susceptible than the Cologne.

 

After I put the plastic stabilizer clamps on the '89 the connectors would not rock and the o-rings held the charge for many, many years until I finally sold that rig with well over 300k on it. The next two owners also had no problems with the A/C. Just one man's experience.

None of my own Vulcans had HG issues and I ran them hard. I saw exactly two Vulcans in our shop with HG issues (and Ford sold a lot of them. I saw at least six Cologne engines in for HG issues of one sort or another.

Again, just one man's experience [shrug]. Sorry if the wider data doesn't support me, I didn't research the issue specifically, but I've hung around Ford forums long enough that I thought I had a feel for this issue; maybe I'm wrong.

 

Maybe it was the earlier Vulcans that had the head gasket problems. But I think neither engine are particularly strong in the head areas.

I forgot to mention that if you buy AC parts (condenser, evaporator, accumulator), they now come with 3 O-rings on their slip-fittings, instead of 2 like the original parts. It's kind of confirmation that the original design using 2 O-rings was insufficient.

I did my first AC service on my 87 Mustang in 1993, and installed those stabilizer clamps around the fittings. I got 2 plastic and 1 aluminum clamp, and all were working fine, just that the aluminum clamp crimped the fitting. I had to repair the system again recently because the hose from the accumulator had stared to leak some time ago. The plastic clamps were still good.

On the other hand, I installed plastic clamps on my Aerostar in 2006 during one of my many attempts to repair the system, and in 2009 had to do it again. That's when I discovered a lot of the plastic clamps had broken; one of the folding plastic "hinges" had broken on each of them. Maybe the later models went cheap.

 

My '97 has the factory-installed metal spring clamp stabilizers around the joints (and I have dual A/C). No problems in the seven years I've had it, haven't added any R134a yet. The compressor started showing shaft seal leakage three summers ago, and I have a brand-new compressor set aside for replacement . . . someday. Still cools great as-is.

 

on mine it was fine til i used some super flush through the system before changing the antifreeze.i suspect the po 'fixed' the head gasket problem the same way i did but with a better product.