Under the Hood

Offset Extension 2.0

If you've owned one of the old 4.6 Mustangs long enough, you've probably heard the joke about putting the starter back in with two bolts instead of three. There's a reason guys do it. The bottom two are easy. The top one is buried where Ford apparently decided nobody would ever need to reach it again. I'm Rick. The Mustang in my garage is a 2002 GT 4.6 with a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles on it, and I've done almost every one of those miles myself. I'm no mechanic. I spent thirty years running maintenance at a paper mill outside Asheville, and that car is how I got to second shift for half my working life. It's paid off. It still pulls hard. My wife Denise quit asking when I'd replace it about sixty thousand miles ago. I keep it running because keeping it running is the whole point. Here's what nobody tells you about the starter on the old 4.6 Mustang. Ford held it on with three bolts. The bottom two you can reach. The top one you cannot. It sits buried above the starter on the passenger side, tucked up where you can barely see it from underneath and there's almost no room to put a ratchet on it. The first two come out. The third one is the job. Last fall I stopped for gas on the way home from work, got back in, turned the key and got one hard click. Nothing else. Battery was good. Connections were clean. Starter was original. I knew what it was. So I started in on it on a Saturday. Car up on stands, battery disconnected, cables off the starter. The bottom bolt came out. The middle bolt came out. I could see the back of the top one with a mirror. I could touch it with one finger. I could not get a tool on it and turn it. A 13mm socket on two extensions and a swivel flexed under load and walked off the bolt. A stubby flex-head ratchet had maybe five degrees of swing before the handle ran into everything around it, and five degrees is nothing on a bolt that's been sitting there for twenty years. A universal joint bound up and twisted off the head every time I leaned on it. Then I tried the trick everybody online talks about, feeding a long stack of extensions in from the front through the K-member. The socket moved around so much at the other end I could barely keep it on the bolt. Three hours in I had the corner of the bolt starting to round and a knuckle wrapped in a shop rag, and I sat down on the garage stool and listened to the whole noon hour on the radio without moving. Monday I called the Ford dealer. The service writer told me the top starter bolt was the whole problem on those old 4.6 cars. Long extensions, swivel, working in from the front. By the time they supplied the starter and did the labor, five hundred and fifty dollars, give or take. He said it the way you'd read off a weather report. I told Denise at supper. She put her fork down and said, "Five hundred and fifty dollars to change a starter. No. They're making it harder than it is." She was right. They were. A few weeks later I drove over to a Mustang club wrench day a friend of mine holds every summer at his two-bay shop. Twenty or thirty cars show up. Fox bodies, SN95s, New Edges, half of them with their hoods up before lunch. Three cars down from me a fellow about seventy had a 1998 Cobra with two hundred and forty thousand on it and an old metal toolbox beside the lift. We got to talking about the starter. He listened to the whole thing, the top bolt, the rounded corner, the dealer quote, all of it. Then he said, "You ever use a chain bar?" I told him I didn't know what that was. He reached into the box and handed me a flat blue bar about the length of my forearm. Told me to press my thumb on the end. Something turned inside it. Not a wobble. Not a hinge. A chain, sealed in the bar. "The chain carries the turn around the corner," he said. "It stays dead square on the bolt, so it can't rock and round it. The only reason that top starter bolt is such a bastard is there's no room to swing a ratchet where Ford put it. Nothing to do with the bolt. It's the room." He put my Mustang on the lift, slid the bar up beside the starter into the gap where a ratchet wouldn't fit, set the socket onto the top bolt, put a ratchet on the other end where there was room, and handed it to me. "Your car. You pull it." It seated flat and broke loose on the first pull. No walk. No rounding. I had the old starter out and the new one in that afternoon. No three-foot snake of extensions. No swivel flopping around somewhere above the control arm. No lying under the car trying to guide a socket onto a bolt I could barely see. He told me to order it from the people who make it, not off Amazon, where they sell bars that look the same but use a universal joint or gears instead of a chain. Without the chain it just flexes and shifts, same as the pile of tools already in my drawer. The maker sells from their own site, wildbeartools.com. Seventy-nine dollars. Seventy-nine dollars against five hundred and fifty at the dealer, every time I run into another bolt somebody decided to bury where a ratchet can't swing. It paid for itself on the starter. But that's not really why it stays on my bench. It stays there because a man who's done a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles of his own work shouldn't have to hand his car to a stranger over one bolt he can practically touch with his fingertips. I've used it a couple dozen times since. The top bellhousing bolts everybody warns you about. A header bolt buried tight against the engine bay. The starter on Denise's brother's Crown Vic. It lives on top of the chest now, where I can reach it. If you run a '96-'04 4.6 Mustang, you already know the bolt I'm talking about. The top one. The one everybody attacks with swivels and three feet of extensions. You don't have to pay somebody hundreds of dollars because they can reach it and you can't. The maker sells direct from their own site. Not Amazon. Not the dealer. The knockoffs look the same. They don't have the chain. They don't work. https://wildbeartools.com/products/extension-wrench