If you missed the last update on our 1987 Mercury Cougar LS known as the Dirty Cougar, click here!
So we have a running, operable Aero Cat…nice! Even nicer, at the last update the total price is still under $550 for everything, including purchase price, of the Cougar. The lights work, the engine runs, the brakes function, and shakedown tests around the local roads near BangShift Mid-West hadn’t flushed out anything we didn’t already know. In fact, we’d been driving it enough that my in-laws suggested, rather strongly, that it was time to put insurance and plates on the car. Anywhere else in the country, this is simple: take old title, bill of sale, and insurance to the DMV or county clerk, pay the taxes, get the plates and be on your way. Not in Kentucky. If you’re doing a title transfer in-state, that’s the way it goes. But bring in a car from out of state and you have to take it to a police station and have the car inspected to verify that the VIN number and mileage add up to what the paperwork you’re holding says. The distance to the inspection station and county circuit clerk’s office from the house is 22 miles one-way. I’ve driven the Mercury, yeah, but not that far in one shot. But there’s got to be a first time for everything, so let’s get this over with.
The first item on the docket was stealing the front wheels and tires off of the Great Pumpkin Mustang for the trip. The original 14″ steelies weren’t the problem, the ancient rubber on them was. To add to some piece of mind, I got more brand-new lug nuts because after the rear wheel came off, I’m not taking the chance. A quick drive around before re-torquing the lug nuts and I had paperwork in hand, ready to make the drive. I left the house, drove six miles to the gas station to fill up, and got on the road. And in the matter of about two miles from the fuel station, everything went solidly to hell in a handbasket. The transmission started to slip. The engine started to buck again. There was a light smoke coming from under the hood and all I could assume was that I just killed an AOD without even trying. I got the car to the side of the road and went underhood immediately…nothing. I checked the dipstick, and nothing was on it. That wasn’t the case a couple of days prior! Lucky for me, a friend saw me in my time of need and drove me to the parts store to get ATF and a funnel. I bought a gallon of the stuff, and dumped quite a bit of it in when I got back to the car. It was in vain, though…abandoning the plan to drive to the inspection, I tried limping it home. At the halfway point I was smelling raw ATF again, so I pulled over into a parking lot. This time, however, I set the E-brake and stuck the car in neutral to run the pump and sure enough, one look under the car told me everything: it looked like someone’s carotid artery had been sliced, with fluid spraying upwards TOWARDS THE EXHAUST with good pressure. In my past adventures with ATF, I learned that it burns like none other. And this is basically soaking the catalytic converter. Effing yikes.
With the car on jackstands back at the house, I found the offending items: rubber hoses on the cooling lines that was rock-hard and brittle. With fresh hoses installed, the leak was gone and I could breathe easier. The next day I decided to try the drive in the early afternoon. And it was an adventure…in the 22 miles between my house and the inspection station, the engine would cut itself off or choke itself out as if someone was pinching the fuel feed closed. I developed a system: accelerate car until either auto-stop or the shuddering kicked in, then shift to neutral, cut power to the fuel pump, wait a few seconds, start car, shift back to drive, continue. I’ll cop to the fact that this might be the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but doing this dance was the only way the Cougar was going to get plated. And it did get plated…it behaved during it’s inspection and now we have a fully street-legal Aero Cat. That’s progress!
The next step was to start bringing the car back to good. And for that trick, I wanted to take off the upper intake manifold and do some cleaning. It was evident that rodents had turned the Mercury into a Habitrail during it’s long sleep, and there was a need to get my Shop Vac out and remove the evidence of the infestation. Happily, I’m finding that working on these EFI 5.0L engines are nice and easy enough. Unhappily, I cleaned up so much underhood insulation shreds, acorn piles and squirrel shit that I might have emotionally crippled my Shop Vac. Even more bad news greeted me when I unbolted the throttle body from the upper intake manifold: 
There was no freaking gasket left between the throttle body and the manifold. For those of you who are unfamiliar with these engines, like myself, there is supposed to be a gasket…water flows through here. Seeing coolant remnants in the opening of the intake and a scrap of what should’ve been a full gasket now has me thinking that instead of my first gut feeling, that either the fuel filter or fuel pump was packing it up and calling it done, that instead the engine was drinking way too much ethylene glycol and was getting way too close to hydrostatic lock. As of writing, the gasket has seemed to do the trick…but now I’ve either got the intake gasket leak from hell or the Idle Air Control valve is stuck at wide-open. Moving on…
Finally, we’ve gotten parts! I located a useable fender and passenger-side rear-view mirror in a junkyard in Mayfield, Kentucky and I’ve filled the empty hole in the radio stack section of the dash with the proper “cubby” storage port. We might have a set of wheels showing up in a day or two and we have a front end shake from hell to sort out, but it’s starting to look likely that the Dirty Cougar will make KOTH #3. I can hope, anyways.
Dirty Cougar Running Total:
Previous Total: $532.29
Passenger Fender, Passenger Door Mirror: $85 ($50 for fender, $20 for mirror, $15 for mirror shipment)
Haynes Manual: $17 (most of which was two-day shipping cost)
The Correct Headlight Bulbs: $13.46
Twelve More Effing Lug Nuts: $34.32
Insurance: $162
The first gallon of ATF and a funnel: $31.14
Hoses, More ATF: $40.62
Vehicle Inspection Fee: $5
Kentucky Registration For The Cougar: $62.00
Throttle Body Gasket: $3.91
Therapy for my Shop Vac: TBD
New total: $986.74
Shop-Vac therapy is not cheap, and it doesn’t always work. It’s possible you may have to put it out of its misery. Sorry to break the bad news.