My sons first truck

[NorthWes]

New to the forum. My 15 year old son and I have been working on his 1996 xlt quite a bit during the pandemic and i wanted to share our progress. I picked the ranger up a couple years ago and it already had a 302 swapped in with an m5odr2 and three inch drop beams up front. Other than that it was bone stock and very clean. Other than the tranny gearing it was a decent truck until it started blowing steam out the exhaust about a year ago. That’s when we decided it was time to rework the whole thing.
The truck came with an explorer 5.0 with 93 cobra heads, cheap dual plane intake, and an edelbrock 600. My sons grandfather helped us out with the new engine build at his buddies machine shop. We started with another stock 5.0 roller block and built a 347. Scat internals, promax 180 heads, Holley intake, Holley 650 double pumper with mechanical secondaries, MSD ignition and distributor and hedman 1 5/8 primary longtubes. After doing all that we decided to install a new fuel cell in the rear. We pulled the bed off and saw that the previous owner did his own hack frame notch which was badly cracked. That’s when the fun began. We reworked the entire rear half with a bunch of fab work, an explorer 8.8, custom dual caliper brackets, new ss exhaust, widowmaker neighborhaters, comp engineering 4 link kit, custom Panhard, qa1 coilover, and a set of wheels and tires I used to have on an 04 mustang gt. 315’s in the rear and 275’s up front on fr500 replicas. We also replaced the old nasty carpet with dynamat underneath and a set of corbeau forza seats with 5 point harnesses. We Recently acquired a built t5 that we will be putting in soon and doing a custom gauge cluster now.

 

[DILLARD000]

A beautiful custom truck, a lot of good work done there!
Though I wouldn't be able to hand the keys to a new teen driver & have any confidence it would not be wrecked in short order.

 

[racsan]

wow! that will be haulin’ ! (and I dont mean carrying a big load) My first car was a ‘79 amc concord with a 232 I-6. First ranger was a ‘88 2.3 supercab 2wd.

 

[superj]

i would be worried about that much power with a new driver, for sure. but the truck looks awesome

 

[NorthWes]

Rev limiters and vehicle monitoring devices are beautiful things. He’ll be driving an 81 vw caddy diesel most of the time as well. This project was a great lesson for him about hard work and rewards. We have somewhere north of 500 man hours into this. He also paid for about a 1/4 of the build, I wanted him to have some stock in it.

 

[Uncle Gump]

I looked long and hard for a VW Caddy years ago... I'd still like to have one of those.

 

[Blmpkn]

Such a bitchin first truck. Lucky kid!

 

[superj]

i would like the vw, too