Love your truck, and the pics jumping it at Huckfest. So much that im really considering building my own prerunner style 4wd truck and choppin my crawler up to use parts to do so.
Not sure if you thought of this since your now going 4.0 but an easy v8 swap that I think but might be wrong that you can stay smog legal is running Fuel injected 5.0 from 97 explorer and they did make some v8 explorer 2wd so you can use that tranny if you wanna be automatic, or you can swap in 2wd 5spd from 97-03 F150 that had 4.2 v6 same bolt pattern as 5.0 and mounts shifter close to factory location. The wiring with the swap is super simple on 95-97 Ranger cabs, my crawler is 97 Cab with 97 Explorer 5.0 engine if you have questions let me know. cause mine was auto now 5spd