Took our 90 town car to the shop. To have the valve cover gaskets replaced and the motor surged when coming to a stop , and under load it had a miss fire. $869. and a week later. But it runs great again. They changed valve cover gaskets, ran a diagnostic, replaced the MAP sensor, tested ignition voltage and output voltage of each cylinder, replaced pvc valve, a breather in the valve cover, and changed all the plugs. and know the electronic gauge clusters gas gauge reads correct too labor $537, parts $273, shop supplies?$30. A while back i had new front rotors and brakes put on, and converted the rear to coil springs in stead of the air ride. so i guess i have put near $1600 in it this last year. The sad part is average retail is $3600, low is $1400. so i wont get my money back out of it. but its a mechanically sound tank of a car thats paid for. hell i only bought the car for $500 15 years ago and not had to do much to it at all. I also had to reset the idle control on my f150, the battery went dead for a week and ever since it would die at stop signs when you had the a/c on. So what i did was disconnect the neg battery cable and take a wire or something to be able to touch it to the positive for a minute to drain the memory, than startyed the truck and let idle for 15 minutes, than put the emergacy brake on put in drive with the lights and a/c on max. and let idle for 10 minutes. drove around after that and it never once tryed dieing with the a/c on. accually the f150 ran pretty good for a 4.6 with p.i. heads,cam,intake. thing really comes to life on top end. One thing i really miss is tinkerin around on my 71 442. and remembering how scary it was to shift to second at 5000rpm with that 462 olds, felt like the whole car leaped 30 ft when it hit 2nd.
