Escape – A Tale Of Woe
I had a 2005 Ford Escape in the shop last week, it was a 3.0L Duratec V6 with two-wheel drive. Weirdest thing I’ve ever seen – there was a big hole in the rear for where the rear diff would be, as opposed to most 2WD trucks where the situation is the reverse. So, it needed an alternator. No biggie, I thought. But alas, with all Ford’s so-called improvements, there comes a price. The alternator is mounted on the lower rear of the front of the motor, in its own little cubby hole, hidden away. The placement was so poorly thought out that Ford had to install a two-piece Ram Air contraption to the alternator for cooling. Naturally, this design flaw makes them fail miserably, and removal requires removing the Right driveshaft, and snaking in various special extensions to gain access to pretty much anything in this forbidden zone.
The ultra-expensive, expansive exhaust apparatus winds all around everything in this area. The never-to-be-made-easy belt tensioner is mounted backwards, forcing you to remove the belt in complete reverse of the way all other belts are routed. The pulley arm is outside of the pulley, so the only free space for the belt to come out is towards the motor. I have visions of thousands of poor general techs cursing these cars as they try to perform simple maintenance.
The lower ball joint does not come out as perceived. My recommendation is to remove the strut bolts, and letting the spindle hang. The tension of the lower control arm is too great for simple removal, and there are no fulcrum points designed in the arm for removal. If you want to kill yourself, go ahead, but you are better off separating the spindle at the strut (rather than the ball joint, where all other cars get separated at. But remember, this is Ford. They have the Better Ideas…) So, after all that hassle, you can now actually see the alternator, and you’ll notice that it’s mounted by three long bolts, facing upwards. The top bolt is a longer stud, and when you get all three loose, the
alternator will not come out until you remove the top stud, which is tricky because it’s reverse torx, E25, I think. If you break the reverse torx head, you’re in trouble. Then, there’s the Ram Air Afterthought Mess that you’ll have to contend with.
It’s made in three pieces, and mounted to the back of the alternator with three 8mm nuts on unnecessarily long studs that will make you wiggle the assembly around in it’s cubby hole for a half an hour. The top piece is clipped into the lower piece with two tabs (where only one is needed, they put another in an invisible place. Good luck getting that out.), and after getting tired of being careful, I just rammed a big pry bar up there and whacked it off. The front piece bolts to the front casing. Then, and only then, will the alternator gingerly slide out of it’s cubby hole. Make sure you get another one before you even start this tale of woe, because we found that they are on Global Backorder and are literally unavailable. We ended up finding a friend who works at Lear and had some prototype 3 liter motors.
We were able to swap their alternator, take both to our local rebuilder, and have the guts transferred into the special, one-of-a-kind casing for this particular application. In fact, the alternator is very similar to Taurus DOHC V-6 alternators (which also fail miserably), but the casing is specially designed for just this one car. This car had only 54,000 miles. It already had power steering leaks, oil leaks, and trans leaks. I would steer anybody away from this vehicle with the v-6. The ZTEC four cylinder would be a much better choice, because even though The ZTEC is a crappy motor, at least it can be worked on.