Timing Chains

Hello everyone. I am trying to gather information to assist a potential (I hope) "on the side" mechanic in putting the engine of my 94 v8 4.6 Bird back together. My ex, in attempting to discover what happened, removed everything back to the dual timing chains and stopped there. The chain on the driver side can be lifted off it's guide and moved around. By now, you have all figured out that I haven't much of a clue about engines, and I apologize. Over the past year I've had several guys say they'd take a shot at it, come over and look at it and never come back... is it really that difficult? Anyway a co-worker is willing to help out but the Chilton's manual only dedicated a small blurb as to replacing it and he asked that I find an owner's manual (which I didn't get with the car). He appears to be more curious as to why this occured at 66,000 miles and wanted to know if there was a maintenance schedule for timing chains??? A lot of things went wrong with this engine over a two year period and I struggled through each new problem and thought it was all taken care of. I won't even go into the 3 times I took it back to the dealership with the transmission, that's a joke. Can I find a book, manual, guide - whatever, to help this man give my "Bird" another shot at life? So many people said just buy another engine and drop it in, it'd be easier? Since I did finally buy another car for transportation, I'd like to see this baby moving again. Can anyone help us?

One reason for being able to move the chain around is it probably needs a tensioner. You can go to your local ford store and they will let you take a look at their service manual. Bat your eyes and they may even let you make copies of the pages you need to help put it all back together. I have not taken apart a modular 4.6 so I am taking an educated guess on the tensioner, but seems like ford went to using one on their engines so it would take up some of the slack as the chain became old and stretched. 66,000 miles seems way too quick for a chain to wear out and be bad.

You may want to post on some of the mustang boards ( Corral.net (http://www.corral.net/main.html) or Stangnet (http://stangnet.com/) ) as they have modular specific forums or go to tccoa.com (http://www.tccoa.com/) (another tbird website that has a modular specific forum).

Thanks so much for taking the time to respond. I'm also checking your link to the Thunderbird site .... it has a lot of info on the chains / tensioners. Thanks again !

Hope you find the info you need.