'96 2.3 liter fuel rail replacement... sort of...

Good old Northeast salt rot found it’s way to my fuel rail. You guys are gonna either applaud me for this one or label me a hack! I guess it’s a bit of both… Let me start by saying this Ranger is an icon in these parts I’ve owned it for over 12 years and it has almost 370k on it and other than wear items, only put a clutch and a timing belt in it. It’s been to hell an back. Best $1200 I ever spent the day I bought it! Due to it just getting to the point where it’s really rotted, it has since been retired to a yard/plow truck. When I went to fire it up earlier to get it ready for snow duty I noticed it was leaking fuel. Further inspection led me to the fuel rail which was rusted and leaking. If you’ve ever tried to find a fuel rail for these, it’s a combo of luck and black magic… or maybe I just didn’t know where to look. It seems there’s about 40 different ones in the 2.3 liter efi variety (exaggeration I know). So I have a friend in Oklahoma who found it in his heart to go to a u-pull it and get me the rail and line down to the filter and return line connection. ….and of course it was the wrong one but the injector spacing is all the same and I’m a glutton for punishment so I figured what the hell…

So first getting the old one out….
Considering how corroded everything is on this truck and keeping costs low for broken parts and gaskets, I wanted to touch as minimum as possible. Pulled off the intake tube, throttle cover, unhooked the throttle cable…




Onto the 7 bolts for the upper intake. The rear most one is a pain to get at up against the firewall. Used a few wobble extensions and got at it with a bit of effort. Once the upper was loose I pulled it as far forward as I could to get at the EGR bolts. That made it easier for the 1/64 of turn I could get each time with the wrench….



Then I pulled off all the vac lines and connectors (making sure to snap the brittle plastic ears off each one!!) and popped the intake off. Good time to port it now for all that extra HP! Now the high pressure connectors with the little circular springs that connect the fuel rail to the lines, did a great job of holding all the salt an grit in them all these years so they weren’t coming apart. I un-mounted the old rail, snipped the gray rubber sections of it and pulled it out. Now the lines are conveniently routed through this little metal plate piece to hold them all to rot together as the grime collects on top of it. I reached up and grabbed ahold of this plate and bent it down to pop all the lines off of it (feed, return, vent and what appears to be an old brake line that I replaced years ago….?) then unbolted it from frame.



Here’s the comparo of the old rail to the new rail. You can see the mounts are different and the vacuum valve and the bleed valve are in different spots.




After a quick test fit I found out the ear on the vacuum can thingy (I think it’s a pressure return line valve…) and the mounts would interfere with the upper intake. So I took the old vacuum can apart to see what was in it and found a lot of extra metal on it where the bolts were. I drilled a hole and put a small nut an bolt through it and then cut the excess off and ground it down a bit….



Next was the mounts. They were in just the right place as to not let me push the rail down onto the injectors far enough to get them to seal so off they come. I cut enough off of them to allow it to… taping up the injector bungs so no debris got into them first….



Ok, now the best part ( I am truly proud of my ingenuity here!!)… There is some pressure here feeding the fuel into the injectors so I knew I’d have to hold it somehow. I cut the old mounts off because they didn’t bolt to anything on this intake setup anyhow so… gots me a little butch strap from some I had hanging around, opened up two holes in it to fit a lower intake bolt into and Viola! … a new mount is born. Wouldn’t really call it a mount more like a strap to keep it from popping off the injectors. *Keep in mind* this is an off road beater/plow truck only!!! That being said, I’d have done the same for an on road buggy but I’d have put more thought into the mount or maybe put another on for redundancy.



All done now just put it back together and run it right?.... well not yet. Putting the upper intake on found me some more clearance issues to the little vac can. Had to clearance a good chunk of the intake web on the #1 runner, there’s a lot of material there but just be careful not to go too deep if you do this….





Finished it up, bolted the line plate to the frame, hooked the new lines in, fired it up and checked for leaks…. Sputtered and farted a couple times and now I got a check engine light from knocking the EGR tube off but for the most part it runs just as good as it did before! Plowed my driveway and now off to the races!

Moral of the story is… find the right rail and you won’t have to do all this crap!

Good post

Have you looked in the mirror to check for redness of the neck... ??? (please, no offense meant, I have done more stuff like that than you can imagine)

You are now a full-fledged shadetree mechanic!

I think FoMoCo had a few extra engineers they kept busy designing intake manifolds and fuel rails. It seems nothing fits from one year to the next AND they have different suppliers for the different assembly lines. Add in the 'model year' overlap where they have made 93,955 of one model year, and have 6,045 sets left over they need to use somewhere... cuz the bean counter ordered 100,000 ...
If you think it's bad on the intake, consider that the fuel pump system varies from one to three pumps(dual tank), and the filter listed may belong to a totally different system.
I'm afraid to try to replace mine as the canister it sits in is stuck and I don't know of a replacement. It has two lines in and two lines out, and a replaceable filter element, so it's not so common.

Good job McGivering. Should work fine.
tom

Tom - No offense taken! On the contrary thanks for the compliment!

As far as the shadtree'ing - been doin it for years. When someone used to break down on the trails (bikes, quads, snowmobiles, etc.) I was the one called in for the "trail" fix. We called it a good ol fashioned Butch Job!


As far as ford, trust me, i know.... I work for them. spent a bit of time in Dearborn in structures manufacturing. It's safe to say, the parts interchanging happens industry wide. I believe in this case it was for the OBDII compliance mandatated by good 'ol Uncle sam... which is the reason for ~80% of the changes! the 80's and early 90's were especially hit hard with the onslaught of EFI and stricter emission!

....not to give the bean counters or other engineers an out or nothing!

I remember when FoMoCo built the stamping plant for the F150 door panels. It was touted as 'something special' that did all sorts of things in 'one pass'. AND they needed to build a concrete foundation 11 feet thick to handle the press impacts.
My thought, why not set the presses to they did not all impact at the same time? That way you don't have the full inertia to absorb in one go, but will have multiple smaller impacts spread over time.
tom

Depends what kind of press... and required line rate...