Last week I bought an '88 Mustang "donor car." I put that in quotes because I doubt I'll be using much of anything from the car besides the engine, which is what I bought it for. I'm not even sure I'll reuse the rear end, although I'm leaning towards rebuilding it as the limited slip works and I have a set of 3.73 gears that I could throw in it.

The engine had a set of Edelbrock Performer aluminum heads. These were the exact heads I wanted, and I bought the car for about what the heads would cost. So I figured it's hard to go wrong there. The car also had a Weiand X-CELerator intake (more or less the predecessor to the Weiand Stealth) that I'd use, and an aft sump Milodon oil pan that I'll use if it will fit in the Mk4.

When I looked over the engine before I bought it I knew there were a number of things wrong immediately, but the fact that they'd never gotten it running I figured was a positive. And sure enough, I was right. Oh boy, did these guys screw things up. For your entertainment, here is the carnage.

My helper helped me get the engine pulled in a couple of hours. It helped that the guy didn't hook up most of the things correctly, like the motor mounts. Upon tearing into it I found evidence that parts of the engine had run (exhaust ports had soot in them), and there was coolant in the oil when I drained it. However there was no evidence of oil in the upper section of the heads, so my guess is these heads had been used elsewhere at some point, or it had been run minimally.
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Crane 1.7:1 roller rockers, which were factory equipment on the '95 Mustang Cobra. However if you look closely, you'll see that they're not straight on, they're tilted. They were all loose, completely inappropriately adjusted.
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Another one of my helpers helping me to pull the valve covers and pull the rockers and pushrods.
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Surprise! Two bent pushrods. From what I could tell, because these roller rockers were installed so, so loose, they actually twisted enough to screw up the geometry and bend a pushrod during cranking. I found no evidence of valve-to-piston contact.
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This picture doesn't do the real view justice, but basically the front 4 cylinders looked much cleaner than the rear 4. None of them were particularly dirty. When I pulled the intake manifold, it looked like they had put that on improperly and that was where the coolant leak probably came from. This is backed up by the fact that the coolant level in the radiator was about at the level of the intake manifold. The pistons were clean enough to get a part number from the SpeedPro hypereutectic pistons.
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Kids, adjust your rockers properly... you can see the damage where the sides next to the forward roller impacted the valve head. Surprisingly, the rollers all turn and seem to behave just fine. Then again it didn't run much.
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I've seen a lot of screwed up things, but I think this takes the cake. Someone used hose clamps over copper pipe to "fabricate" this oil pickup. The screen was pointed upwards at a 45 degree angle like that. YGBSM
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Bearings were not in good shape. So I don't know if this bottom end had been run previously or if someone had gotten it running briefly at one point, and with no oil pressure just completely screwed up the bearings. Hard to say. From everything else that was wrong I'm sure that this person didn't prime the oil pump at all.
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The bores, not so good. Pistons were 40 over, bores are all 50 over. It appears that the guy honed them using one of those drill hone tools, and kept the thing in one spot too long. No cross-hatching evident at all. And this one had a pretty bad score mark in it.
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Bare block with Ford 9N (torn apart) in the background.
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I like tearing apart motors and like I said, I bought the car reasonably enough that I'm still in a decent spot. The block is a D8VE-6015-A3A, which from reading up on it is one of the strongest 302 blocks from the factory. But already being 40-50 over (depending on how you look at it) and having that scoring mark on the one cylinder, I'm thinking I'm probably looking at another block.

The rods and crank look to be fine. I'm not finding any casting marks on the crank in the locations that they're supposed to be in, which makes me wonder if it's aftermarket. Need to look at that further and see what I can determine about it.

I need to confirm that the heads aren't cracked and that the valves still are straight and seal correctly. I'm going to put a roller cam in the engine.

What I'm leaning towards at this point is finding a roller block to rebuild, maybe even a complete roller 302 (with not as good heads) and tear that down to put new pistons of my choosing in. Then figure out what to do with the other components I'm not going to use.

I'm leaning towards rebuilding the rear end from the Mustang for the Mk4, and doing the 5-lug and disk brake conversion. The limited slip works in it and I have a set of 3.73 gears I can use. More decisions to be made while I wait for the kit to show up next month.