Originally Posted by marauder307

It isn't really a "bounce"...just a jiggle. And I'm on the fence about whether it'* truly worth the hassle of dealing with the dealer. Around here, what takes most mainland dealers mere hours to fix, takes these guys days...it'* the whole "Hawaiian time" thing; wcollier would understand.

The Marauder was great when I first bought it. The biggest single problems that I can point to with that car are a couple of things that don't actually have anything to do with the vehicle itself:

1) Mercury built it, but never advertised it, and at numerous dealers, refused to support it. This kinda relates to my second point...

...2) They built it badly. Paint was absolutely horrible; I had my roof, hood, and trunk redone under the body warranty. The alignment specs were set as though the car were a Grand Marquis; while it was certainly based on the G-Mark, it was a vastly different critter, and using alignment specs for skinny 17-in tires would destroy a set of fat 18-in tires on the front ends in no time. The tires couldn't be rotated because you had different sizes front and rear (235/50ZR18 in front, 245/55ZR18 in the rear---the taller profile was meant to give the car the "raked" look of a hot rod). And the stock BF Goodrichs (BFG G-Force T/A KDWS) have been a source of complaints as well; these tire sizes were only made for the Marauder, and BFG has pulled them from production. You can get the KDW2s, though...

Worst bedeviling problems have been in the engine and drivetrain. The valve heads were faulty, and a LOT of Marauder owners have had their cars drop dead on them because cylinders 7 and 8 overheated from poor cooling. Valvetrains themselves have been found sloppily constructed; the cam journals were too lightly torqued at the factory. Transmissions had a bad C-clip somewhere in the gears, and those C-clips were prone to break under load, go back through the tranny, and take out 4th and Reverse gears (Mercurymarauder.net'* main vendor, Dennis Reinhart, has developed a fix for this using a spiral lock clip instead, and he'* sold hundreds.) As to the diff, Ford actually had to put out a TSB to service/replace the half-shafts for scoring issues. And, of course, there'* the usual problems with Ford brakes...kinda tough hauling down 4200 lbs of charging black 4-wheeled freight train with rotors smaller than what we get on the GXPs.

I put up with these worries for as long as I did because I really believed in the value of the car. It'* a rarity---well, sort of---and being the musclecar nut that I am, I easily recognized the historical aspects of the Marauder name. One thing that I DO miss about it is the intimidation factor; Moses didn't part the Red Sea better than I could part rush hour traffic with that cop-car body. The trunk size was magnificent in every since of the word and had a nice industrial-plastic organizer in it that I could drop wet stuff in if I had to.

I met and wooed my fiancee in that car...and drove it everywhere from Daytona Beach, FL to Honolulu, HI. 3 years of some interesting adventures...which probably contributed to its demise. I don't drive my cars hard, but they do get used...I recall plowing through snow in St. Louis with it; couldn't get above 25 because any faster than that and I'd be all over the road. Scared the $hit outta some punks in a Camaro on I-55 one Sunday afternoon while coming back from Coast Guard reserve duty. I remember intimidating the H*** out of a couple of vagrants in Pt. Arthur TX one night while on recall duty with the Coast Guard down there---what else would YOU think when a big black 4-dr sedan pulls up and a guy wearing a dark blue uniform and a gunbelt jumps out of it? (Actually I was just making a pit stop before going on duty...) Made a couple of trips across Missouri and Kansas to see my sweetie while she was still on recall duty at Ft. Riley with the Army Reserve...been through rain, sleet, snow, hail, mud, and 40,744 miles of adventures with that car...

So I'm going to make some new memories with this one. I love it and look forward to many years with it...