Ford Fairmont 1993 Problems

Carbon build-up in the combustion chamber is normal and can effectively reduce the size of the chamber and increase the compression ratio, which can then lead to a pinging noise. The old way to deal with it was to blow the carbon out by giving the car a long run at high speed. You would then usually see a cloud of brownish smoke from the exhaust. The other way to de-coke the heads is to remove them and clean the carbon out by hand. I'm guessing your mechanic hasn't suggested that because it is an expensive option.

In essence, yes, the ED wasn't much more than a facelift of the EB, but remember the ED is an old car now and that's the biggest issue with it today.

I can't tell you how long, either in years or kilometres, you should keep your car. The older it gets the greater the risks of requiring major repairs and rebuilds will be. At 200,000km-plus it is far from worn out, but the risk of major rebuilds increases with each kilometre, and the car's value diminishes at the same time. You need to decide if you want to drive it to the end of its life when it will be worth little, and risk major repair bills along the way, or sell it now and get into something newer which will presumably be cheaper in maintenance terms. If it were my decision to make, I would move into a newer car.

I'd venture to say you don't see many later Falcons with bumpers hanging loose like you do with the older ones. Basically, it's the improvement in the production of the plastic parts. There are many things that have contributed to the improvements, not the least being better mountings. Put it down to progress.

I would try an auto air-conditioning specialist as they would have to deal with this issue regularly and I'm sure would have worked out a solution.