My dad gave me this car a year ago. In great shape however, we’ve had some issues with extreme vibrating. Motor mounts have been replaced, brakes and rotors are new, ball joints new, and tires still have good tread left. Vibration is so bad that the steering wheel shakes and so do the seats. It happens it park, neutral, and at stops. Please help because its loud and very embarrassing.
If the vibration takes place only when the vehicle is stopped, then whoever decided to replace brakes, rotors, ball joints, and tires threw away a whole lot of money–unless those parts really were defective, even though they would have nothing to do with the stated problem.
Many, perhaps most, small 4-cylinder engines do exhibit a lot of roughness when at idle–enough to vibrate the steering wheel in many cases. As to whether the vibration that you are experiencing is worse than the “normal” roughness for this engine is something that nobody can determine through cyberspace.
All of that being said, I would suggest that you concentrate on things that would actually cause an engine to run very roughly, and that includes fairly simple things like spark plugs, plug wires, and ignition timing. You did not tell us the model year of this Escort, so I have no idea whether the ignition timing is actually adjustable on this car, but if it is, that is a definite possibility.
Another possibility is compression that is very low in one or two cylinders. You also didn’t tell us how many miles are on the odometer and we have no idea about the oil change schedule for this car , so I don’t know how realistic it is to believe that the engine could have compression problems, but I thought that I would throw this idea out there for your list of things to consider.
Essentially, unless the motor mounts were not installed properly, I believe that you are looking at an engine problem.