Ah, Rod! Your '91 Tempo brings back many wonderful memories of why I will never own a Ford again! My wife had that same year in red, and it was a dog through and through! Hope you never have to change a water pump on that thing!
It went to the shop over and over again for a deafening bearing noise-no shop could ever determine the cause, but all of the pulley components were changed over about a zillion times. It ate serpentine belts and bled oil everywhere-with only 60k on the odometer!
I did a lot of work on that car in the 18 months that we had it, and most of the respect I lost from Ford was how poorly their shop manual was written for that car. I don't know how many times I would come upon some cramped assembly that obviously required a special tool to change it out, and the Ford manual simply stated "take out the old one and put a new on in". Just shameful!
My last drive in it was nice. I had to drive it 5 miles to the dealership for a trade in. While it had been fine the day before, on this day, I started it up, and I had no power steering. I popped the hood, and was greeted to a running engine with no motion on the serpentine belt. So, I sped off to the dealership with no AC, alternator, water pump or power steering and crawled onto the lot with an overheated, dead battery mess. They still took it, though.
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