Originally Posted by w123fanman

What to you has been the worst car to work on?

I feel like the 190E 2.6 is a PITA but my mom's 1996 Grand Marquis is far worse. Tried replacing a valve cover gasket today and once again ran into Ford's brilliant engineering, aka somehow making a 4.6L small block V8 engine hard to work on in a massive engine bay. The front of the engine is super easy to work on, unlike the 190E 2.6 but the sides and back are terrible. The catalytic converters also aren't the most fun things in the world. Problem is, most of the problems we've had the with car have been located on sides or rear of the engine bay (like the $230 blower motor resistor that we've had to replace 3 times).

We were finally able to get the valve cover out (took 30 minutes to get the back bolt out) cleaned it up, tried to clean up as much of the mating surface, put RTV where needed, then reinstalled it (also a PITFA) and it leaked like a sieve at the back bolt that is nearly impossible to get to and completely impossible to use a torque wrench on. Might be that you are supposed to pull the engine in order to do it properly.