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timing belts and engine wear

I bought a 2011 Crown Vic with 300k miles 12 mos ago and I'm wondering how to approach servicing the timing belt. I know very little of it's past maintenance records other than what I've done with it this past year. Basically I'm wondering if I should go ahead and attempt to replace it now, or wait til something starts to go wrong. I don't know how timing belts typically go bad...if they just break or start to stretch or what. If this is an interference engine I'm imagining a fairly bad event so I'd like to get educated and be pro active about it.

Second...Scotty Kilmer teaches that the worst wear an engine sees after changing the oil is before the oil gets pumped back into the filter and then into the engine components during the first engine restart. But he says if you disable the ignition spark somehow when cranking for the first time again, the lack of combustion in the cylinders helps with reducing this kind of wear quite a bit. I don't have an owner's manual and I'm not sure what fuse to pull to disable combustion ignition, or if removing a fuse would be the best way to do this. Any opinions on how this should be done?
 

Sparky83

Virginia Chapter member
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Norlina NC
with it being a 2011.. its not a belt that handles the timing but a chain... honda was big on the rubber belts for timing.. but the ones ford used were always chains.. (occasionally on the 4 cyls youd run into the plastic gears there).. now they do have plastic guide chains and a tensioner that is plastic coated to keep the chains from loosening and jumping teeth... if you have 300K on it and dont know if theyve ever been replaced id recommend having it done... for the rubber belts they recommended 40-100K..

for yours the chain is not really the thing to worry about as they dont "stretch"... the problem is the plastic guides wear out letting the chain go slack... of what ive read on the 4.6's the recommended interval for changing the guides and tensioners seems to be anywhere from 100-150K..

as for the oil filters... if yours is vertical or nearly vertical prefill the filter before installing it... for the ones that are mounted sideways into (normally on your 4 cyls theyll be completely horizontal) the block theres just no way to prefill those... all your moving components in your engine still have oil between them even when the engines drained... short of you pulling every component and cleaning them off completely you wont ever have a completely dry engine at start up (even more so now with all the synthetics on the market that are far superior to the protection of the old school dyno oil)... it takes hardly any time at all for the oil pump to circulate from the pan to the rest of the engine.. while yes your oil filter is the first stop after leaving the pump the rest of the oil passages inside the engine still contains oil in them.. your pressure gauge sensor tends to be in the path right after the filters... if you watch that youll see how little time there is between start up and the reading on the sensor..
 

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