sand drivability????

Hi, hope this is the right spot for this question.
I have a 88 ranger short bed single cab 2.0L 2wheel drive, I got rid of the motor/tranny for a 302, with a ZF 5S-42 trans, and put a 8.8 LS 3.08 gears under it. I've been slowly changing out parts and driving it daily, but I'm wondering If I got some paddle tires on rear and pull the front clip off, if it will mobilize around sand dunes fine? didn't know if the motor/tranny would make front too heavy and rear would just be a tiller lol.

would like some input from experience, I go to Waynoka, OK with quads and side by sides, but My whole Intentions was to build a sand truck but its hard to buy parts without $$$.

I've seen jeeps out in the dunes but they were in 4wd and they didn't get around very good.

You will notice most if not all sand rails have the weight in the rear, so no your 2WD pickup wouldn't be good for the sand, front wheels will dig in when turning or even when letting off on the gas.

4WD can pull the front end thru the sand so will work OK if tire pressure is lowered down to 8-10psi.

With sand you need to keep the front end up which is hard to do on a pickup truck

my buddy has a 4 seat RZR and he drives around in 2wheel drive, loaded with 4 guys and they aren't small, smallest is 220lbs...I think together it weighs 2,000-2,200lbs he has a lot of crap added on it. Roof, etc.
Anyway I wanted to scale it and see COC is and if its like 40%-60% or what ever and try to match it with my ranger. I've weighed my ranger and it is only like 2700lbs.. I'm sure I can loose a good 400lbs like doors,fenders,bumpers,hood. relocate the battery, and try to get COC same as the RZR, I think it would do better, considering a RZR isn't 350HP

I mean pre runners drive in sand and they are front engine..
I know more power is better, and lighter is better.

Sand is like the water in some respects, when you are "in" the water you can't go very fast, i.e. swimming
When you are just touching the top of the water you can go very fast, i.e. water skiing.

Same with a boat and motor.
If hull stays in the water speed is limited
If hull can plane, only part of hull touching the water, then it can go alot faster.
But when boat slows down it sinks into the water again, this is from the weight of and in the boat and it's surface area contact with the water.
Narrow V-hull will sink in more than wide flat bottom hull

Tires on a vehicle are like the hull of a boat when sand is involved

RZR is 1,900lbs empty yours is 2,700lbs empty

RZR could be 60/40 with 4 adults

Yours would be 75/25 with 2 adults

RZR has 10" wide tires, stock, you would need to go to at least 14" for your front tires as far as the sand is concerned, the wider the better.

Sand driving is all about staying on top, like a boat planing.
Horsepower is a must to stay well up on top

Narrower tires are like V-hull boats, with enough horse power you can get them up on top of the sand, but as soon as you slow down they sink in.
But wider is much better because they don't sink in as much, that's why you let the air out of tires and run 8 psi, makes tire wider so it stays on top of the sand better.

Cornering is something else again, with 4WD you have some assistance with front wheels pulling through the turn staying on top for the most part.
Just FYI, FWD vehicles pretty much can't go anywhere on sand, lol, need some balloon tires .
With RWD you need to keep gas pedal down as much as possible to keep front end as light as possible, that will keep outside wheel from digging in as much as possible, it will still dig in that's the only way it can turn the vehicle, lol, gotta have some traction.

IMO your first $$$ buy, after a sand flag and pole , would be some wide tires and a jack, swap tires at the dunes.
They don't have to be tall tires, clearance isn't as big an issue in sand as footprint size.

I think next time we go to Waynoka, I'm borrowing a set of paddles and I have a flag. I'm just going to see for myself, I have 15x10 rims I can get some takeoffs for the front, and the paddles for the rear are 29" tall and 13" wide, If it works it works, if not oh well I have other stuff to ride

mopar_66757 said:

Hi, hope this is the right spot for this question.
I have a 88 ranger short bed single cab 2.0L 2wheel drive, I got rid of the motor/tranny for a 302, with a ZF 5S-42 trans, and put a 8.8 LS 3.08 gears under it. I've been slowly changing out parts and driving it daily, but I'm wondering If I got some paddle tires on rear and pull the front clip off, if it will mobilize around sand dunes fine? didn't know if the motor/tranny would make front too heavy and rear would just be a tiller lol.

would like some input from experience, I go to Waynoka, OK with quads and side by sides, but My whole Intentions was to build a sand truck but its hard to buy parts without $$$.

I've seen jeeps out in the dunes but they were in 4wd and they didn't get around very good.

Click to expand...

you want tall skinny tires up front.....pizza cutters.


giant fat bastard paddles out back.

I got rid of the motor/tranny for a 302, with a ZF 5S-42 trans, and put a 8.8 LS 3.08 gears under it.

Click to expand...

this can be an issue. if your over 300 hp and it revs to 6000 easy enough, pulling the front clip and putting the battery and spares all the way to the back should more then scoot ya through the sand. but 308 gears and 31 inch x 14 wide paddles needs at least 300 hp to rip them enough to transfer off the pizza cutters.

to go slow in 4wd, fat tires make sense to a degree, but the more surface area the more resistance in real life...i spent a considerable amount of time at silver lake over the last 35-40 years and learned this combo is a good place to start with a 2wd. i hate that place because i killed way...way too many transmissions and thousands and thousands of dollars dickwaving for no reason....

try it. add sand to the bed for ballast if you have to. i think you will have fun....and will be getting a new clutch if you cant help but really really have fun.

Mine is 2wd, has always done fine whether it had a 4cyl, V6, or the 302 it has now With or without Paddles. Just gotta drive accordingly.

In the 80s we did a lot of training the in USA high desert. Mostly rocky, only occasional problems with sand. When we went to Desert Shield, we all got stuck. We had the skinny dually 5-ton pulling an M198 howitzer--M813 or M923--something, I don't remember--I had a truck with a winch and a 3-man cab. Doesn't matter.

Our first turn off of the asphalt onto the Arabian sand desert--we all got stuck. We had traded the original wide tires on the gun for pizza cutter tires because the guns bounced too much. The gun weighed 16,000# and had no suspension. It would flip on its side with the wide, bouncy tires. On the pizza cutters, which had 120psi in them, the tires would explode, and the gun bounces just as high. So we would have to put the truck spare on the gun, which was in no way rated for that load, and drive really slowly.

But back to the point. We had 10-20 tires--the unidirectional ones with duallies, not the Super Singles, and when we hit the sand--we sank. The skinny, overloaded gun tires were like anchors. We hadn't trained on this before, except for some failed beach landings that we didn't learn anything from. You come out of a landing craft--splash into the water, the truck surges up and down and gets stuck, a giant Sea-Bees dozer winches you up the beach and you spend the next 4 hours repacking wheel bearings to get the salt out. That was the life of an 80's marine artilleryman in the Pacific.

Our first day in the Gulf, we turned off the hardball and all got stuck. Our trucks were no built for this terrain. We had a 65,000# GVWR truck with a naturally aspirated Cummins 855--it is like a tri-axle with the axles turned up, but it has a front drive axle. It has a two-speed transfer case, but you can't shift it from high to low on the move--they thought.

After we all got stuck in the first 15 seconds in that Arabian sand, and we destroyed our huge hydraulic winches trying to pull each other out and spent the next nine months with the winch cables wrapped around our front bumpers...embarrassingly--what we found out was that by lowering all of your tires to 10psi, causing the rear drivers to touch and make a really fat rear tire, you could go through anything.

Problem was, we did artillery raids on the Iraquis. thy had these rockets they would wheel up and shoot and our artillery could not match it in range. This was before the air war. So we would drive up to the border, or past, and wait for them to bring their rockets up and then shoot them. It meant doing stretches of pavement along with stretches of sand track. Using the trucks air pump, there would be no time to air the tires for the trips on the hardball. Running this type of stuff at low psi meant we wore out tires fast.

And as the truck had not much power, despite having a huge engine (no turbo) we had to use the low-range on the fly, even though it wasn't meant for that. The transfercase control was like the parking brake lever on a car. You shifted 1-2-3 in low, and then hammered on the lever BANG-BANG-BANG until it popped into HIGH, and then went 3-4-5, if it would pull it.

Honestly, it was the stupidest truck in the world. 240hp and 5 forward speeds on an 80,000 GCWR truck. It's unbelievable how much power the sand sucked out of that truck. Those skinny tires on the M198 gun made it into an anchor.

The Army used a huge Oshkosh thing to pull the M198, complete with a crane to handle ammunition. Now the Marine Corps has a little British 155mm that you could pull with Explorer. Either of those seems good to me.

Thank you for your service

The old adage for engines applies to sand driving as well

"there is no replacement for displacement"