i really like those 4 bangers too. all my dad bought for the plumbing company trucks were 4 cylinder 5 speed rangers (and our one mazda). he said those were the most dependable and best gas mileage truck you could get for the work we did. he put a 3/4 pipe rack on every one of them, a 6 foot folding ladder, an extension ladder, a test kit, sawzall, pump, and gave each crew a truck. we drove those suckers 75-100k a year so every two to three years dad would buy another set of trucks. we only had one that something happened and hte engine lost compression and had to be towed in over the time i worked there and when i left, since my 98 mazda was at its mileage limit for a company truck, dad let me keep it when i got hired on base. that 98 had 325k miles when i took it home and still drove it for a while working on base. i only sold it because we had two kids and it was a single cab.
the reason i have the truck i have now is because i thought it was a 4 cylinder truck. i didn't even know rangers came with a small v6 versus the larger v6. my uncle decided he was going to give up his license so he asked my brother and i if we wanted the ranger he had just bought less than a year earlier. he said free, he just wanted one of us to have it. we both said yes but i said i didn't think we should take it for free because i its a very nice truck and i thought he should get back money for it. so he said come up with a number and thats fine. i gave him 3k for and still had never popped the hood. i had actually only driven it once and it felt just like the company trucks so i liked it. it wasn't till a while later my oldest son and i were looking at something and i commented that at idle, it kind of sounded like a small v8 or a v6, not a 4 cylinder. we popped the hood and sure enough, it was a 6. i had to google it because i didn't know what the 3.0 was, other than a 6 cylinder.
that led to why does it have torsion bars instead of springs and what rear diff and ratio does it have? so i learned that an edge was more than just some stickers and that i didn't have the same coil front suspension all the company trucks had, which was a bummer because i have had torsion suspension before.
anyways, back to this thread drift, the 4 cylinders are great trucks and the fan blade direction tells you which way the engine turns
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