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Shran
Junk Collector
TRS Forum Moderator
Supporting Member
Article Contributor
Solid Axle Swap
Truck of Month
Background on this: if you take a 80-97 Ford steering box and swap the guts from a 73-79 truck (I think) into it, it'll steer backwards (so when you turn the steering wheel left, the wheels turn right.) My buddy down the street thought it would be fun to do that for our offroad club events so he built a steering box and we put it in my old '88 Ranger and used it for our Halloween event last year. It was a lot of fun to drive around an obstacle course and having a manual transmission made it even more of a challenge. I needed that truck for other purposes and now have given it to my kid so I had to put it back to normal. I SHOULD have kept the 95 Ranger he rolled as it would have made a perfect donor... make it steer backwards and leave it that way/park it in the woods at our other property until needed but that only occurred to me after I parted it out.
Enter this rolling disaster:
I bought it off FB marketplace last week for $300. It runs really good but it's really rusty and has been mercilessly abused and now either needs a clutch or it has a bunch of neutral gears. Not sure which yet but either is not a hard fix. So the plan here is to make it move under its own power as cheap as possible, and then permanently convert it to steer backwards and leave it like that for people to mess around with at club events. I think it will be a blast.
Cost breakdown so far:
- It still has catalytic converters so I'm going to hack those off, should be worth about $150. Straight pipe will be fine...this will never be on the road again.
- Came with a really nice tool box. Probably worth $100 there.
- It has a manual 1354 transfer case and the linkage & boot is intact!!!!! I may keep this or I may sell it, not sure yet, but that would pay for a clutch/flywheel and any transmission parts I need... decisions decisions
- I will for sure need to do wheel bearings and maybe ball joints on the drivers side front. Sum ting wong there. Probably free, but, hard to say.
Here's a vidja from last year's event - some people got in and conquered it right away, others were really on the struggle bus:
Enter this rolling disaster:
I bought it off FB marketplace last week for $300. It runs really good but it's really rusty and has been mercilessly abused and now either needs a clutch or it has a bunch of neutral gears. Not sure which yet but either is not a hard fix. So the plan here is to make it move under its own power as cheap as possible, and then permanently convert it to steer backwards and leave it like that for people to mess around with at club events. I think it will be a blast.
Cost breakdown so far:
- It still has catalytic converters so I'm going to hack those off, should be worth about $150. Straight pipe will be fine...this will never be on the road again.
- Came with a really nice tool box. Probably worth $100 there.
- It has a manual 1354 transfer case and the linkage & boot is intact!!!!! I may keep this or I may sell it, not sure yet, but that would pay for a clutch/flywheel and any transmission parts I need... decisions decisions
- I will for sure need to do wheel bearings and maybe ball joints on the drivers side front. Sum ting wong there. Probably free, but, hard to say.
Here's a vidja from last year's event - some people got in and conquered it right away, others were really on the struggle bus:
