Engine Help! Installed Front Crank Shaft Seal Backwards

youngstangsman said:

So, do I absolutely need to pull everything back off and get the seal out, or can I just put another on from the front?

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you CANT be friggin serious...


I can't even...

From what I recall, the front seal on the 3.8 doesn't have a flange, so why can't you just fish it out through the front with a seal puller? You might have to trash it, but that's a small price to pay to avoid taking it apart again. It's going to be difficult to get two in side-by-side without interfering with the crank gear or having one pop out. If it fits, well, what the heck, I've seen worse. But to tell you the truth, if you don't want to get it out, and it's not interfering with anything, I don't see any reason why the seal wouldn't work in reverse. Two seals would probably cause a problem, as the outside one wouldn't get lubrication and might get damaged or damage the balancer.

Personally I like to drop the pan when I remove the timing cover, because as you mention it's easy to get a lot of trash into the pan when you remove it (stuffing a rag down there helps, but a lot can fall in just as you remove it.) It's also meant to be assembled in that order, it's easy to mess up the pan gasket by trying to push the cover in (you can of course loosen the pan to make this easier, which carries a chance of wrecking the pan gasket itself).

I've had an amazing amount of RTV and gasket chunks find their way to the oil pump pickup screen after doing one without dropping the pan, and doing a pretty good job cleaning up. But of course the tradeoff is, with the Mustang layout, dropping a pan is a huge amount of work. So... definitely do a good job cleaning.