how to find out what motor my 1998 ford escort zx2 came with?

Question

I bought this car in a auction and i think the motor it has is not the one for this car because i went to the autozone to buy some autoparts and they always are diffrent.I recently did a tune up and changed the sparkplugs and the cables and i was coming home from work and it overheated i opened the hood and smoked was coming out now it doesnt start.I was wondering if i changed the sparkplugs and the motor is from a diffrent car would that cause this problem and what should i do to try fixing it? please help

Answer 1

Call your local ford dealers parts dept. Give them the vin number and the will tell you what engine the car had from the factory.

Answer 2

Doesn't the intake manifold area/air cleaner/top of the engine have a litre or cubic displacement number on it, liike 3.1, or something like that to tell you what size engine it is?

If you bought the wrong plugs for that engine, you may have a BIG problem. Take all the plugs back out again and check them.
If the plugs broke inside the engine at the electrodes, you probably hurt the engine REAL BAD and probably damaged your pistons. If that happened, you may as well forget that engine from running without a rebuild job.

When the engine "overheated and smoked," what did the smoke smell like?
Oily?
Wires burning?
Coolant smell?

That will tell you the first place to be looking for that overheating problem.
If it was an oily smell, probably what I said before happened. You broke a piston with the broken pieces of the spark plugs and the compression is escaping into the crankshaft area.

Answer 3

There are vin numbers on the engine and chassis, if they match, then its the engine that came with the car.

There aren't a whole lot of choices when it comes to this vehicle, and putting the wrong sparkplugs/cables would not cause the engine to overheat unless there was a major meltdown in the computer (if the spark was too hot, the O2 sensor would tell the computer and the computer would retard the spark or dump more fuel into the cylinder)

More then likely you have a different problem.