The car had a 351-W in it. It was a pain to work on and it fried my steering box (headers were too close and cooked all the grease out of it). It was fun to drive but I just didn’t need all the hassles associated with the maintenance.
The car was an I6 with 3-speed manual from the factory, and I wanted to go back to something more reasonable in terms of fun to drive, economy, and uniqueness. I also wanted to bring the car back closer to it’s original state.
I found a 250 I-6 advertised on Craig’s list. It was from a 1973 Maverick and came complete. After I got it home I did a compression test and found that two cylinders had no compression, even after squirting oil into them through the spark plug holes. So off to the machine shop it went.
I found that it was a standard bore (now .03 over) and overall in good shape. After getting it back I slowly started to integrate it into the car. Most of it was actually painless and fairly simple. It bolted right up to my T5 (which is why I wanted the 250) and pretty much into the car. There was some fussing around with some aspects, which are described in more detail in the linked pages below.