The fun begins!! Swap time.

Okie Dokie, here we go. Jumped in while I can. Between work, dealing with county permitting, spec'ing a new rental doublewide, and life in general I gotta just jump.
My shop isn't big enough for the entire car to fit, so I had to use furniture pads to close off the opening, and as far as pulling it, only thing wrong was I should have jacked it up farther to get a better view, but having grown up in a Ford dealership 40 some years ago I learned to work by feel. The hardest part was getting some of the connectors off but the good part was having the OEM harness to look at the connectors. l little less than 5 hours to pull after I got started with it.
The surprise was how much the oil reside had accelerated on the front of the engine. The oil pan was totally covered in oil, and I just changed the oil three weeks ago and have only ever just had to wipe off the oil plugs chin, but never any oil in 5K changes.
I'll have to take the intake and clean it later today when we run errands. I'm pretty shocked by the amount of crud that has already accumulated since I cleaned it. Next is cleaning up the engine compartment and wiring harnesses.

 

I mis-posted this on here rather than the Gen III forum where it belonged, but it had been a long day.
Ours started with the severe misfires and shaking while in heavy traffic. After cleaning the totally clogged EGR and intake system, the symptoms reduced to random misfires, bad stumble at start, loss of coolant, the smell of coolant steam and steam from the exhaust. The coolant loss amounts have varied, but what was strange was the week that we were in Florida ( 3rd week of Jan) we towed it down and back) but it went through almost a gallon of coolant while there, and hasn't had to be refilled since we got back. We still lots of crud getting into the intake, but the exhaust port on cylinder #2 is much cleaner. Evidently it a head gasket failure contemporaneous to the EGR clogging which seems to the extremely common on the Gen III engines. I wanted to hold off on the swap until it turned over 250K miles, but 248K will just have to do. The replacement is a Gen IV with 5800 miles.

 

Thanks for catching that. I'm going to rebrand it as a Gen III.V

 

The swap went well. Took longer than it should, but me being me, I re-wrapped the wiring harnesses since the OEM wrap wasn't too fond of brake kleen. Plus I had to deal with life for a few days. It's been great and is almost due for the first oil change. The next one I'll send in a oil sample.