I've got a 97 F150 4.2L 4X4 that blew a head gasket the other day. Is there anyone that has changed one of these that can give me a heads up as to any little quirks I should be aware of???

Any and all advice is welcomed.

 

tko - I recently put PI heads on my '98 4.6 and did a few things that saved some time in the long run.

If your power steering pump is held on by 4 bolts, remove the line going into the p/s pump (if you haven't changed your fluid in a while, you can do two things at once) so you can get to the bolt that is behind the line. Otherwise it will take a very long time to remove it with a wrench.

When removing the crankshaft pulley, make sure you remove the washer behind the bolt prior to installing the puller.

Have a scrap piece of cardboard handy and draw an outline of your front cover. Then as you remove the front cover bolts, punch them thru the cardboard in the approximate order/orientation that you removed them. This will make getting the correct bolt/stud in the correct location a piece of cake.

The Mustang boards have a lot of articles about timing the cams properly. This is the most critical step b/c you don't want to have PTV contact or have your timing off by a link.

I also removed my exhaust manifolds, which took some time. But it made it easier to remove/install the heads since I was doing it myself. If you have help, then you could leave the manifolds on the heads and save some time.

Make sure you get new head bolts since the are TTY.

I also have an excel file where I outlined the steps and torque values. Let me know if you are interested in that.

 

Unfortunately, I believe that the 4.6/5.4 and the 4.2 are completely different under the hood, and I think they use completely different hardware and parts, so I'm not sure how much info from a 4.6 head removal would apply to a 4.2.

 

My bad, I saw the "4." and didn't catch the 2.