Good idea frazer, I did my head gasket on my old EA... took me 3 weeks alone.. with the waiting for the head to come back and all. And back then nobody told me it should be set to tdc

Get yourself a genuine manual or pm me and i'll try to scan the relevant pages for you

all teh manuals ive looked at including the genuine manual dont give a great description they all say to use the ford special tool which prob makes it real easy lol

3mm allen key to reset the timing chain tensioner

okies - got bored this morning so started messing with the engine!

always helps to have a good toolkit - can't stress this enough! not much fun needing a particular socket/spanner and it not being there when you're half way through a job

here is the project engine:





lol shame we forgot to protect the rocker cover when lifting it! ah well!

first thing is to remove the 3 bolts on top of the rocker cover - from memory, they are all 10mm ones. once all these have been taken out, the rocker cover should just lift off - revealing this underneath:



best bet next would be to mark the timing chain, so it stays where it should! you can use white-out to mark on both the chain & the cog, or a fat marker pen - i've used cable-ties this time around as its what i had around & reckon its the best way to do it:



from there, i've undone all of the rocker gear bolts - all 10mm bolts, and theres about 30(?) or so of them. mine weren't that tight so it didn't take very long at all



once all the bolts have been removed for the rocker gear, it should just lift off. it may take a little bit of wiggling around to get it off but it should come quite easily. this is what the rocker gear will come off like:



just be careful when you're pulling the rocker gear off that you don't end up dropping any of the lifters down the oil returns etc - as they're quite small they could disappear rather quickly!



once the rocker gear is gone, you'll be left with the following - note the red valve springs, as this is an EF XR6 head (EF Fairmont Ghia II) so not all will have the same springs!



here you can see where the lifters clip into the rocker gear (from the underside)



so thats all thats been done today so far!

question is - how does the cam come out now? i didn't get stuck too much into it, but does the bolt on the front of the timing chain cog need to be undone?

looking good bob, be interested when ya get to the head

and ill lock in yes, i think you need to undo that bolt

yes you do need to undo that bolt

you don't need to pull the rocker gear off to do the head gasket...

or are you changing cam at the same time?

i'm stripping it right down - i'm just doing a doco along the way!

As mentioned , yes. Don't worry, the cam and the sprocket have keyway like notches.

any more progress on this?? could really come in handy for the cam i have in my room ready to put in (been there about month man im lazy)

will borrow the camera again & see where i;m at!

still no progress =( i want to pull mine out but tooo scared too. probably end up blowing up my engine.

phong =P~

I did mine over christmas holidays...was SOOOOOOO much easier than I thought it would be...took 2 days all up but I reckon could be done much less if I did it again...