My Ranger after Twenty Years

[Josh B]

Got my 1st Ranger in 2003, and it was free, absalutely no encumbrances. Had to chip and scrape paint and chip and scrape again, but it got done. Went back by a week before T'Giving and he handed me a clean title. Xmas and new years day were both on a wednesday that year and I told the boss I was going to Oklahoma for the holidays. I think he only intended one week but I took two. When I got back he didn't really say much cause it had been just like I told him, Mon and Tues before Xmas they just partied and messed around, and did the same Thur and Friday, then New years week they Partied Mon and Tues and walked around with their head in their hand Thur and Fri. Hek, one of the Mexican guys brought a whole deer up there and grilled it on the job

 

[Lefty]

Don't forget though if you do work yourself, when it's possible, you save a ton on labor. For a lot of the things I've done, parts costs were the smallest part of it. That's not always true, but you can have situations where the part is $20 or something like that but if you pay somebody to do it all of a sudden it's a $100 job or more. My dad used to say "If I do it myself instead of paying someone else, that's just like I'm paying myself". Sounds funny, but, it's true.
But it's time lost and the older you get you find out that's running out. If it's a project, or you enjoy it, or it's a diversion from the mudane, that's time well spent. Let's face it though, not all jobs (fixing trucks) are fun. There can be other frustrations like difficulty finding certain parts. All those things have to be balanced against paying more for a new or late model used. It just depends how a person values their time versus the money they have to spend. So if you had unlimited money, you'd always buy new, because you simply wouldn't care about the costs. The other end of the scale, and I've been there several times, is, little or no money, but time to spare. Then it's a good fit to just get something running and everything working on it and you have a daily driver dependable even though maybe not what you'd get if you were rich, but there's a sense of accomplishment, or satisfaction in solving a problem. That has no monetary value but certainly it has worth.

At least older trucks are broken in. I said to my other half about her 263k Lexus, if there were any defects in the manufacture probably they have been found by now.

I'll tell you one thing that kind of burns me. Taxes. If I take SS and work, it's crazy. As self-employed I'm paying double SS tax to begin with so that's a little over 15% of net. I expect that, and some years are losses, so no tax. But check this: at the point where I would net enough to get taxed on the SS payments (haven't taken it yet), I'd also be exceeding the standard deduction so I'd get hit with it basically all at once and paying 50% marginal tax rate. That's a disincentive to working. If I have to make 40 net I'd have to be grossing 60 at least and take home would be 20. It doesn't make sense. And here's the thing - for an economy to work you have to have money flowing in it, and if it were more attractive tax-wise for people to work and collect SS at the same time, it would benefit the economy because they'd be spending more money.

So just in rough terms, if I had to make $120 net before taxes to get $60 out of it, then it's a lot more likely I'm going to spend an hour working on my truck rather than working for money because even in the best of situations I never made tons per hour self-employed. It's really a quite sudden jump. That should be changed. They are limiting you to not a lot more than poverty level, these days. The limit should at least be the median income imo.

Your grill looks just like an Explorer grill I saw an hour ago. I like it.

Sometimes I think an old truck is assembled twice. The first was at the auto assembly line, a terribly efficient process performed by professionals and robotics at lightning speed. That first assembly pretty much holds together in the truck's first life. The second is a slower process. Parts break down and not in a predictable logical easy-to-assemble way. Whether or not you do the work or pay someone, the parts needs to be removed and replaced. They tend to rust and weld themselves together. They are not often easy to reach. The replacement part is another story. One-by-one you go to the store, and, if the store tells you that part is no longer made, you will have to go to a junkyard and remove it from another truck. This second assembly is far more time consuming, a real labor of love. Many have no time to do this of course. The truck that gets to live that second life is very very rare.

That grill is actually an amalgem of 2 F-150 grills and a Ranger Edge grill. In order to make it work. I cut the mesh out of the Ranger "grill' leaving the surrounding plastic which would fit into the Ranger opening. Then I cut the F-150 grills into fourths and reassembled them with epoxy and sheet metal repair strips. Smoothed everything out with bondo, then cut that assembly down around the outside to fit into that Ranger surround,then epoxied and bondoed all of that. It had to be sanded and primed and sanded again before repainting silver and finishing with urethane.

And why not do all that work? I spent a lot of time repairing and replacing anyway. I might as well make that truck my truck, my own. I'm not the only one here who lives by these rules. There's quite a few here, far better than me, putting in new drivetrains, tweaking the suspension, replacing wheels and tires, repainting too.