Originally Posted By: blupupher
Originally Posted By: MNgopher
Even if the phasers are included, they'll be junky Dorman ones or some other off brand.
To be blunt, there are tons of stories of folks trying to save money on this repair and getting burned.
Thus my qualifier on the cost using quality parts. A job with this amount of labor I'm going to use decent parts...
A lot of the cheap kits offer time or mileage warranties. Great until you realize that's on the parts - not any labor. These are not parts I want to be replacing regularly, warranty or not.
Yup. I am looking into this for my brother in laws '04 5.4, and everyone "in the know" recommends OEM parts (phasers and all timing components), as well as making sure you replace the oil pump with a Melling oil pump (forgot which one, there are 2 that are recommended).
I don't think parts cost are that bad for what your getting, but the labor is very intensive.
Dorman supposedly has come out with some updated phasers to fix the issues they had with their original kit, but I like you said, this is not a job I would want to repeat (either doing it myself or paying someone).
The Melling oil pump is a good idea because it's an iron case pump to replace the aluminum case pump.
The factory aluminum case pump opens up at high temps and bypasses a lot of oil straight out of the pump housing. The iron Melling pump does not.
Cujet is right that 5/20 is not up to the task of many of these engines, but it's because of that leaky pump more than anything.
When I was running 5/20, before I got my oil cooler, my engine sounded like marbles were being poured into a branch shredder. I thought the engine had critical mechanical failure. But then when it was cool, it ran like a dream.
On the Lincoln forums, some had noted that when they took their Navigators into the dealer about this problem, the dealer replaced their engine oil with Motorcraft 15w-40 and the problem went away. I decided to do the same thing just for the heck of it, and my disabled truck suddenly sprung to life and never had that issue again. I later installed an oil cooler and went back to 5/20. I'm now running 0/40 to keep the light-load 1200-1500rpm rattling at bay.
