How to Replace Fuel Tank Filler Neck 1997-2001 Mercury Mountaineer

Hi, I'm Mike Green. I'm one of the owners of 1A Auto. I want to help you save time and money repairing or maintaining your vehicle. I'm going to use my 20-plus years experience restoring and repairing cars and trucks like this to show you the correct way to install parts from 1AAuto.com. The right parts installed correctly: that's going to save you time and money. Thank you and enjoy the video.

In this video, we're going to be replacing the fuel filler neck on this '98 Explorer, same as any '97 to '03 Explorer and Explorer Sport, as well as '97 to '01 Mountaineers. It’s straight forward. You should only need a quarter inch socket set, which has sockets anywhere from six millimeters to eight millimeters, and maybe a screwdriver. We do run into a problem where our clamps are all rust, so we use a cutting wheel to get off one of the clamps, and you'll see that in the video, but overall, it's pretty straight forward with just basic tools needed.

Okay, so we're looking at the driver's side rear wheel. And you can see, once you have the car jacked up, it's very easy to get to the filler neck right here. You can see there's two clamps here, and then one on the other hose right there. Okay, so you'll need to remove those.

We're going to start here by removing the cap. We're going to remove three seven millimeter bolts: one, two, and three. The first time, I use a ratchet and extension to loosen up the bolts a little bit. I'm just going to switch to this hand driver to get them out the rest of the way. So, with the bolts removed, you can see that the filler neck is loose now.

Here, I'm spraying the clamps down with some penetrating oil in hopes that I can get them off. I hope you have better luck on your vehicle. What you'll see actually is that we were unable to get them off the conventional way. Okay, what we found is we couldn't get this clamp off because this is rusted. We can't get to it with a screwdriver or a wrench, so I'm going to use a cutting wheel to cut the clamp without cutting the hose too much. Once you've removed that clamp, then what you want to do is just grab the tube and the hose, and get things to twist. You can see all kinds of dirt and rust fall out of there. That's not even tight. Okay, so the other clamp is tight, so I'll pull that off. Remember, this is your old filler neck, so you're not too worried about it. What I'm doing is just bringing the neck down to where I can pull on it. Okay, I got that one off. Now, I'm going to twist on this one and pull it off. You can see what happens to these, the moisture just kind of collects in there and rusts that out, as well as a lot of the rest of it rots out.

We have the new filler neck from 1A Auto. We can see it’s nice, a lot better shape. What I did was I put a little bit of just motor oil on the end here so it will slide into the hose easily. Then I have some new stainless steel clamps already on the hoses. We can just put these right in. Okay, let me go right down to where the old one was. Okay, now we can stick this and move it down. Kind of bring it right up into place without being too far to pull, put it up in.

Okay, now I'm just going to fast forward through tighten up these clamps. What you want do with these new clamps: it's pretty easy because you can just use a screwdriver. What you're going to want to do is tighten up the one that's in the back first. Make sure you keep it at an angle so you get the screwdriver, or I actually use a socket and a socket driver, make sure you can get to the back one. Tighten it up and then go ahead and tighten up the front one. So here I'm tightening up the back one. Once I've done that, shift to the front one, and they're all set.

Now, on the filler neck side, I'm just going to kind of reach in back behind, and make sure I rotate it so I can see the holes that the bolts go down into. Start that one. You may need to push on here pretty good because the bolts kind of thread the holes as they go. Okay, and now I'll fast forward starting those other two screws, and then tightening them up. When you tighten these screws up, you want to get them snug. They don't have to be incredibly tight, but you want them nice and snug. Put our cap on. We're all set.

We hope this helps you out. Brought to you by www.1AAuto.com, your source for quality replacement parts and the best service on the internet. Please feel free to call us toll free, 888-844-3393. We're the company that's here for you on the internet and in person.