ForOffRoadDriving's 94 Ranger Build

[ForOffRoadDriving]

I organized my photobucket album by month and then by section (engine bay make over, dual battery pics, engine install, core support work), so some of these pictures might be out of order. Over the course of the month of december I managed to redo the engine bay and on new years eve while my friends were out partying, I was in the garage putting my motor and trans in alone. Here are the engine bay pics:

 

[KELLY88]

This thread is incredible. It's awesome how many pictures you've got of the processed and how detailed everything is. Body off frame cleanup and rebuild is a hell of a project. Props for tackling something like this to bring that Ranger back to life.

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

This is the drivers side, which involved twice as much work as the passenger side as far removing parts to get to the bare inner fender.

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

These are some pictures of other things I did during the engine bay makeover:

This is my other half. she has helped me out alot during this build whether it be sanding, painting, or just getting me beer. she is also the only person to spend mulitiple 10-12 hour days in the garage with me and not have the urge to stab me with a long screwdriver!

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

I plan on running up to 8 hellas on this truck eventually, and i would also like to get a winch that i can put in either the front or rear reciever, so i added an extra battery tray to accomodate another 65-850 battery. I searched the website for information on dual battery set ups and found the painless wiring kit and thought it was a cool idea to be able to shut off one of the batteries so i decided to make my own kit because i couldnt see paying that much money for a solenoid, a switch and a roll of 4-flat trailer wire.

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

The drivers seat is the one place that i really wanted to do some custom rearranging. In my 1990 I have the switches for my off road lights mounted where the battery switch is on this truck and it drives me crazy having to lean forward and feel around in the dark to turn them on and off, so i ended up improving on the e-case switch design. I also installed my first set of gauges because i want to be able to keep a close eye on how things are doing.

The spring inside my door handle broke so i replaced it with some aftermarket handles i got from Shermans for $3.94 a piece. they look to be exact so we'll see how long they last.

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

No ranger build would be complete with out authentic ranger station stickers!

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

on new years eve i was working on getting my clutch components mounted on my engine so i could put the trans and motor together. i thought i needed longer bolts for the flywheel so i went out into the snow and crawled under my parts truck to retrieve the bolts, but i never took the pressure plate off so i had to remove the 6 bolts that hold it on. 5 came out, 1 got rounded off. i was on a roll so i dragged about 100ft of air hose out to the truck and was cutting the head of the bolt off with my cut off tool when i heard a POP! and then my neck had an instant burning sensation. i tried to get the head of the bolt off from my neck but i had gloves on and couldnt feel what i was touching so i basically just pushed it around and made it worse. i took these pictures a week apart from eachother and its almost totally healed now. so let this be a lesson to all of you, even when you think youre safe cover your neck!

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

Despite being burned, i pressed on and got the engine and trans together, after finding out that the bolts i was after were the same length as the ones i took off from the AT ring gear (DOH!).

I had to pull the truck out for a day so my girlfriend and I could work on her truck. This is the first time it has been out of the garage since the first snow of 2008. My girlfriend has an 05 sport trac and for christmas I got her factory fog lights (since her truck didnt come with any) and a factory foglight switch (her truck also didnt have any wiring for foglights like my 94 did). It took all day to get things sorted out, but she had me teach her how to change her oil and filter, check transmission level and fluid color, check differential levels and how to check the transfer case. we also changed her fuel filter (it took an after hours trip to work to get a nice metal fuel line disconnect set) and i showed her how to clean her K&N. After we got all that done we wired the fog lights in and cut the switch into the radio bezel as it is originally.....what a long day!

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

Putting the engine in with out the core support was super easy, so of course i had to pay for it when i put the core support in. Luckily my best friends dad (who worked at the Ford Wixom plant for 20 years as a body repair man) was there to help set things straight. we ended up trimming the sides of the new core so that we got a square measurement corner to corner and an equal lenght at the front and rear of the fenders. once we accomplished that i tacked the cor ein place and we hung all the sheet metal and test fitted it, to make sure we had room for adjustment without having any binding. it was alot more work than i had anticipated, but im happy with the end result.

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

This is my latest progress under the hood. I have pretty much just been cleaning things up and painting them so that they look worthy of being under this hood. i also installed the rest of my cooling system components and got a battery for my main tray.

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

i started on my driveshaft yesterday. i really want to go with a 1 piece shaft, but since i already have the 2 piece and its not bent im going to use that for now. i still need to pay for the cooling hoses and serpentine belt so spending money i dont have to just doesnt make sense right now. im going to play around on photo bucket and see if i can modify these images so you all can see them.

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

heres some pictures from the weekend. My girlfriend had to go to Kentucky for a 3 day weekend with her work for a Photography convention so we went out to dinner before she left. I also had a 3 day weeked off work which meant 3 days to work on the truck without anything to distract me from Truck Time! I got my driveshaft down from the rafters in my garage and grabbed a few other things to clean up and I headed to up to work to use the shop.
After getting everything apart I treated all the parts to a coat of metal ready and POR 15. Tonight Im going to give them one more coat of POR 15 and then I will be assembling things tomorrow night. I also cleaned up the preheater shield and the air box lid and MAF from my purple truck because it would suck to find out that the last one I cleaned up was bad and have to buy a new one. Even if its not bad, at least ill have a spare to decorate my wall with.

 

[ForOffRoadDriving]

I got bored and decided to make a picture of what my truck could look like, so I coppied the "rock crusher" into paint and deleted the D35 and made it a 2wd. Then I imported a picture of the ford sticker off my back window and replaced the bowtie with it.

 

[Ranger44]

This a very thorough build. I plan on doing simular, but not quite so "paint happy".

Good job, keep it up.