My Thunderbolt Build Thread

[Inherited Thunderbolt]

Hey everyone, I decided that since I've been working on this truck for a while now, that I should start a build thread and go through all of the things I've done, been doing, and will do to this truck in the future. It's my hope that the work I do on my Ranger(s) will inspire others to pick up a wrench and work on your vehicle.

This is my (deep breath) 2002 Ranger XLT 4x2 SuperCab, with the SLP Engineering Stage II Thunderbolt Performance and appearance package. Behind it, is my 2021 Ranger XL that I am using as my reliable daily driver. This thread will be dedicated to the work I do on my Thunderbolt. I am undecided on if I will do any work on the new Ranger; since it's supposed to be my daily, reliability is of the utmost importance. Additionally, I'm still making payments on it and I'm hesitant to do anything that might void the warranty. I'm pretty focused on modding the T-Bolt.

A little background on this Thunderbolt; as my handle implies, I've 'inherited' it from my father. Namely, my pop owned this truck for about a decade and loves the thing. He was the second owner and took care of this truck as best as he could; running it up to nearly 180,000 miles before the cumulative effort of issues that manifested on it compelled him to part with the vehicle. I had just purchased a home and had been in the market for a cheap truck. Because he couldn't bear to see it go away, so he offered it to me for free. Free as in beer is certainly cheap enough for me, so I gladly accepted it, put it in my driveway and proceeded to use it to haul things from Home Depot and Lowes as I worked on things for the home. In my mind, I wasn't thinking much of this truck other than to drive it every other week and use it to haul things I couldn't stuff in the hatchback(s) of my car. When this was given to me, I had a 2008 Mitsubishi Eclipse GT which I myself loved (seriously, it's an underrated car, as are Mitsus in general. I miss that thing quite a bit and used to joke with people that it was more American than whatever it was they were driving since it shared parts with Chryslers and was 100% built in Normal, Illinois). I was in the market to replace my Mitsu simply because insurance and maintenance costs had gotten quite out of hand when the pandemic hit. I took advantage of early fears and traded in my Mitsu for a 2018 Golf R that had been tuned to 400HP and could run 11 second quarter miles. It was a stupidly fast car that I bought because of how intoxicated I got over it's absurd speed. Over time, I learned speed wasn't everything, and after about six months, I was splitting my driving time about 50/50 between my Golf and this Thunderbolt. The Golf had the performance I craved, but this car had a leisure and comfort about it that I had cherished in vehicles I'd owned in the past.

In March of this year, while on my way to work in the Golf, I was rear-ended by an F250 Dually, with a trailer carrying about a ton of wood. The impact was hard enough to drive me into the car in front of me, and them into the car in front of it, and them into the car in front of it. The accident ended up totaling out my Golf, thanks to the series of electronic nannies equipped to it that were completely destroyed in the accident, leaving me with just the T-Bolt. After receiving my insurance settlement, I had set my eyes on a C8 corvette; I'm a programmer by trade and I've always been attracted to technology in cars. But as the pandemic carried on and supply shortages, combined with an overwhelming demand for the new C8 set in and drove prices through the roof, I realized now wasn't the time to buy a Vette, and I reset my desires to something more attainable. I ended up driving a handful of different cars including an Challenger SRT Hellcat, a Mercedes C63 AMG, a Mustang GT350, and C5 and C6 Corvettes, but at the end of the day, I kept driving home in the TBolt because, while it didn't really feed my need for speed, it was a more compelling daily due to it's comfort, simplicity, and generally better road manners. After a while, I began to lean towards fixing it up and making it my daily instead of trying to find a 'daily driver I could take to a track.'

After researching the idea of overhauling this truck, eventually I realized that the pandemic had not only affected my ability to buy a new car, but the ability to build out this vehicle as well, and decided that a truck as a daily driver wasn't a bad idea. I went through the gamut of mid-sized trucks to decide what I wanted and came away with two conclusions: I really liked the Chevy Colorado and Ford Ranger, and I hated the Toyota Tacoma. While the Colorado was ultimately my first choice, I ended up in a Ranger because they were more available and had a better price, and I really haven't looked back. When it came time to buy the Ranger, I weighed the idea of both trading in the TBolt, and selling it outright, but ultimately decided against either one. Rare != valuable, but I could never get over the idea that this truck's look wrote checks it's drivetrain couldn't cash, and that I could fix that. So I decided that even if I wasn't going to use this as a daily driver and hauler, it could at least be my hobby. I went to harbor freight and ponied up for a 2-ton hoist, bought reseal and timing kits from RockAuto, and pulled out the library of reciepts my dad handed over with this truck to identify what parts had lifetime warranties on them, so that I could rebuild this bad boy and give it a new lease on life.

Before I had done all of this, I did need to do a few things to this truck to make it more suitable for use. My father is a large man, over 300lbs, and over time he had managed to break a couple of things just using the vehicle. The steering column and armrest were wrecked by him using these for ingress and egress. I found a seller on Ebay who was selling rebuilt steering columns for $300 and dropped another benji on an armrest kit and a new top pad, then installed them. They made a world of difference. Before I lost the Golf, I also had the radiator fail, so I spent some money replacing that as well. Even with these repairs, the interior still needs work; the original Thunderbolt floor mats are long gone; my dad replaced them with beige mats (the truck as a grey interior) and I thought they looked repulsive so I dropped a few bucks on universal rubber mats I cut to fit. The stereo is old and crappy, the dash has some burned-out bulbs and there's a subwoofer installed that takes up one of the jump seats and is sloppily wired. The carpet is wrecked, and again, because my father is a large man, the seat cushions are kind of clapped out. I do intend to address the interior, but I've always been of the mind that the drivetrain of your vehicle is the most important thing; if your vehicle doesn't drive, it makes no difference if your interior is nice or you have a good paint job, because it can't get you anywhere. So my focus on this journey has been addressing the needs of the drivetrain in order to get the thing running without problems.

The vehicle, as pictured, has been worked on to address many of the drivetrain issues I discovered when I acquired it and used it. Specifically, it had bad timing chain guides, bad motor mounts, was leaking from the passenger valve cover and rear main seal, failed front sway bar end links and upper control arm ball joints. Because I was 'in the area' and had warrantied parts, I also ended up replacing the front and rear brake pads, front and rear struts, and lower control arm ball joints. Currently the motor is reinstalled in the car and has been bolted back to the transmission. I've continued to work on this over weekends with my father and tentatively plan to have the thing back running next weekend. In terms of motor upgrades, I've installed an underdrive crank pulley and will be wiring up an electrical fan to free some ponies from the accessory drive. I've also replaced the whining power steering pump and will try some better fluid to keep away the squeals. I also took some time to paint away some of the rust on the frame and to splash the brake system in ford engine blue, just for some extra style. In refurbishing the motor, I replaced all the seals except the head gaskets; I was hesitant about disassembling rotating assemblies and didn't want to remove the pistons. Despite the problems on this engine, it was still running and had good compression on all cylinders, and didn't want to risk having to have the engine or heads machined because I took them apart.

My current plan is to get the thing back together and enjoy the fruits of my labor for a little bit before addressing the interior and possibly getting a paint job on the truck. Next fall, I will begin Phase 2, installing an Eaton M90 and the Moddbox supercharger kit. This isn't me just blowing smoke about this work, I actually already have these parts:

In the left box is the Moddbox kit, and in the right is the Eaton Supercharger. The blower needs its snout rebuilt, and I intend to paint the blower too before bolting it on. I also plan on getting some beefier fuel injectors and a water-methanol kit to keep air intake temperatures down, as well as finding a tuner to make this work reliably. I haven't fully decided on how much power I want out of it yet. The current engine has the underdrive pulley that would reduce how much I can get out of the SC and I'm not keen on bolting this on to the existing engine with it's old crank and rod bearings and existing head gaskets. I'm not sure if I want to source a new engine for this kit of if I'll pull it again and do a proper rebuild. I'm still considering other things too such as a 3.73 rear end and a rear disc brake conversion. But I'll be working on other things like the interior and the wheels that I'll be posting here in the meantime. Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be posting pictures and videos of this thing back together running and driving, looking to take it to my local dragstrip for some 1/8 mile times and ripping some sick burnouts for you guys to enjoy.

 

[alwaysFlOoReD]

Great write up.
Looking forward to more.

 

[dvdswan]

45 minutes later... I finally finished reading the write up. Great write up though.

 

[Inherited Thunderbolt]

So it's been a couple of months and I have some updates.

After a lot of confusion, hemming and hawing, and a couple of trips to the junkyard, I was able to sort out a variety of problems I had created for myself due to poorly documenting the disassembly process and got the engine back together and to my excitement, it fired up on the first turnover of the key. However, all was not right with the truck. My dad and I could tell right away that it wasn't firing very well. and seemed to be making a rattling noise. We also couldn't get the front brakes to bleed properly and didn't have pressure, and the thing was down on power, and not long after startup it started leaking ALL the fluids, transmission fluid, coolant, and oil. We spent the last two weeks going through everything to try to find out what was wrong and we've managed to get a list together that I think covers all the problems. I'll go into more detail in another post later, but I wanted to ask for some advice here.

The biggest problem we had was the rattling noise, which at this point I believe to be related to spark plugs causing random misfires.

This is a picture of the type of spark plug that was previously installed in the engine, Autolite XP5144 Iridium tipped spark plugs. These were installed at the 100,000 mile mark and stayed in until I tore down the engine and were firing off just fine. When I pulled them, they were clearly worn but still appeared to be in decent shape so I held on to them just in case. When rebuilding the engine, I elected to replace them with these:

This is a Bosch 9660 double iridium plug. In terms of construction, the only difference is the Autolite ground is platinum while the Bosch is iridium, both have iridium tips. When we turned the truck over and I mentioned the rattling noise, at first I thought that perhaps the catalytic converters had failed because it was inconsistent, but using a thermometer I was able to determine that cylinder 3 wasn't firing at all and cylinder 6 appeared to only be firing intermittently. When I went to check spark plug 3, after pulling off the spark plug wire I discovered this:

The terminal and insulator broke off right below the lip of the shell and came out attached to the plug wire. The plug on 6 was similar but slightly different; the plug stayed together when I pulled the wire off but broke in half in a nearly identical fashion when I removed it. The inner electrode also showed evidence of arching through the insulator at the break.

I thought it was weird that both rear cylinder bank plugs broke in this way, and to satisfy my curiosity, before preparing the engine to be extracted again, I reinstalled all of the old plugs, hooked everything back up and turned it over and suddenly, no more rattles, pops or bangs and all six cylinders were firing again. So these plugs appear to be the cause of that issue. I'm kind of at a loss as to why this might've happened and I'm hesitant to go back to these Bosch plugs when I put it all back together, but I've already bought 'em and it would cost more to send them back to rock auto than it would to buy new plugs. Has anybody had a similar experience with iridium plugs, Bosch plugs, or any kind of spark plug bought from Rock Auto?

I'm probably going to get a new set of the Autolites instead of trying to use these Bosch plugs since they worked fine before and the engine clearly has a problem with these plugs, but I'm just wondering if anyone else has ever run into anything like this.

 

[bobbywalter]

These things are picky with plugs. Even the older ohv.

 

[Ranger850]

+1^^^ I know Autolite and Motorcraft are essentially the same thing, but I would try actual "Motorcraft" plugs if possible. Some Autolites are made by "Honeywell" while others are made by "Denso". Two different manufacturers FYI

 

[Blmpkn]

Upon everyone's reccomendations here when I had to replace the plugs in my old 2.3 I bought the Motorcraft ones.

 

[Inherited Thunderbolt]

It's been a while since I posted an update. I had some problems with the truck, then some problems in life, then more problems with the truck. Fortunately, everything is good now.

I don't know what was going on with the spark plugs; I ended up actually just ordering two more iridium plugs to replace the broken ones.

There were not one, but *multiple* rattles. Trying to solve the problem, I re-extracted the engine and tore it down to try to find the cause; there was some metal shavings in the pan which scared me until I got a look at the back timing assembly and could see a wear mark on the side of the head where the chain had obviously been thrashing against. After further inspection, the guide pin screw on the back that was supposed to slot into the rear cassette was not installed properly, so the chain was just thrashing around. I flushed the engine out, replaced that chain for good measure, and reinstalled the guide correctly.

After putting it back in, the engine seemed to run fine but sounded like a can of marbles. It didn't take long for the "10 mile problem" to expose itself in the form of a failing starter. I replaced the starter but continued to hear the marble sound; and the test drive exposed new problems I previously did not have; the overdrive light had come on, the truck threw a SEL, and the ECU wouldn't even finish it's emission cycle to give me codes to troubleshoot. After about 75 miles of driving the starter failed again, and pulling it revealed that I had completely destroyed the gears on both the starter and the flywheel. Apparently, I had done enough in service to require the starter to be shimmed, which I did not do.

Not having the patience to pull the engine a third time, a jack to pull the transmission, the skill to troubleshoot or repair a transmission, and the inability to pull codes, I relented and took the truck to a local transmission shop where they troubleshot and resolved most of the problems to the tune of $1600. The truck now has in addition to a retimed and resealed motor, a new flex plate, starter, torque converter, transmission solenoid pack, transmission oil pump, and new seals. The service engine light appears to be a problem with the MAF harness; it's getting a high signal. I need to take the multimeter against it to confirm but I have other plans. Other than that CEL, the truck now runs and drives great. Runs strong and shifts smooth.

I took it to a local stretch of empty road and hooked up Torque to get some performance numbers. As of now, according to Torque, with a lightened underdrive pulley and an electric fan:
0-60 - 8.27 seconds
1/8 mile 10.2 seconds @65MPH
1/4 mile 15.9 seconds @86.5MPH

This was over the course of two runs with consistent numbers on both runs on two different stretches on the same road. I'd say that's not too bad on a 185,000 mile drivetrain. I had a little wheelspin on my launch so I could probably find a couple more tenths in there but I'm pretty satisfied with that as a starting point. I'll take some photos and videos to post here later this week of the current state, because I'm about to take it to paint.

 

[Inherited Thunderbolt]

Put in a new shift solenoid == Put in a solenoid pack. They didn't replace any solenoids. I discovered later that the 2-3 shift hangs when you get on it. This wasn't related to the service I asked them to do on the truck; frankly I never knew it was there because before I started work on the truck I would never really get on it out of fear of blowing something up in the drivetrain. Apparently this 2-3 shift is a common problem on these trannies. I took the truck back into the shop as they requested this morning and asked them about it and it was suggested to me I speak to the owner of the shop because they might cover the repair under their warranty (something I did not expect or asked for). Unfortunately, he took a hard fall this weekend and will be out of the shop for a few days recovering from his injury. I intend to have this problem fixed, covered or not, but if they're going to warranty the repair I'll push to have it done sooner rather than later; if not, then I'll hold off on it until I'm ready to get the AC recharged.

 

[Inherited Thunderbolt]

Back from paint.

 

[stmitch]

Back from paint.

Truck looks pretty nice! Full respray or just some touch up? Any plans for lowering and/or wheels/tires?

 

[OldBlue61]

Lookin' good!

 

[superj]

that truck looks so nice. i had never even heard of a thunderbolt but now i have something that is going to need me to spend time and money to make mine look as cool as.... thanks



ha ha ha, it looks awesome though

 

[Inherited Thunderbolt]

Truck looks pretty nice! Full respray or just some touch up? Any plans for lowering and/or wheels/tires?

Got a full respray from Macco. The bed rails and front valance were a mess and the hood scoop is a reproduction (the original one cracked and broke) and was never painted. I'm going to cerekote the door handles, mirrors and bumper this weekend to freshen up the plastics. It's not perfect; a $1000 paint job isn't going to be, but it's so much better than it was before.

I have tires on the way, gonna slap a set of Cooper Cobras on it and get it aligned. When I rebuilt the engine last year I took the opportunity to basically replace the entire suspension with warrantied parts so it's got new struts front and rear, as well as new tie rod ends, new upper control arms, new lower ball joints, new sway bar end links and new motor and transmission mounts. I thought about lowering it, but decided against it, I don't want to risk damaging the body kit on speed bumps or curbs and it's current ride height is good enough so that it all clears without having to be especially careful.

The wheels are a different story; I don't have the original center cap covers and they're impossible to find. What I'm going to try to do is fit some caps that normally go on a Mercedes that are the right size and look pretty close, but don't have the right inner lip. To make them click in and fit, I'll use JB Weld SteelStik on the existing inner lip to build it out then use a dremel to build the contour, and finally a little glue to keep them from popping off until I need them to.

If that doesn't work, I'll get new wheels: American Racing Torq Thrusts.

 

[Inherited Thunderbolt]

that truck looks so nice. i had never even heard of a thunderbolt but now i have something that is going to need me to spend time and money to make mine look as cool as.... thanks



ha ha ha, it looks awesome though

Thank you my man, I appreciate that. This site has an article about the Thunderbolt Ranger that you can read here. My truck has factory tow so I don't have the rear rollpan, and the badges aren't made anymore but I'm pretty sure the rest of the look can be replicated from the aftermarket.