New to TRS

[PNW-Ranger]

Hello TRS. I have a 1999 Ranger XLT 2WD with 155k miles that was purchased for 3k. Bone stock, all original, and bought from the original owner's family who says it was bought new for 15k in 1999. It has the 4.0L and the 5 speed manual. Would be curious to know if this story checks out. I was told they custom ordered the ranger from the dealer to tow a boat. They wanted the biggest engine with the least amount of extra interior options attached to it. Said if memory served them correctly they had to bump up to the XLT trim to get the 4.0L with the tow package? Interesting if true. Says the tow package got a different suspension in the rear, a frame mounted hitch, trailer light connection, and quoting them here by saying "some type of extra cooling gismos". The grandfather of this family put almost all of the 155k miles on the vehicle himself but unfortunately he was too old to drive the truck and it has been sitting in his garage on and off since 2014. His reason for selling it was he found out another family member was secretly driving it without his knowledge and absolutely abused that poor truck in under a year. It now had scratches, small dents, what looks like small purple paint splotches in the paint, and backed into something that pushed a hole into the tail gate bending the tailgate latch and part of the bumper. He wanted it to go to a good home and not be destroyed by his family. He found out I am currently restoring a Bronco and F-350 (giving him the stories on both rigs) and he decided that he wanted to sell it to me. I was super stoked to get a really clean ranger for that price with a great story. However it did need some love. The whole point of this build was for my brother who is stationed in Hawaii and needs a cheap reliable vehicle while he is on active duty with the Marines (will probably pass this account over to him when I give him the truck). This is what has been done to the vehicle since it was purchased other than a basic full service / inspection.

Previous owner had a pretty beat up white metal shell on the back. I wanted a nicer shell you could move stuff around and have it secured and out of the elements. I ended up selling the white top for $100 bucks to another ranger guy and scoring an old fiberglass Raider shell from a junkyard ranger for $100 bucks. Completely rebuilt and repainted it to match the same color of the ranger.



Not too long after that I started noticing a lot of electrical gremlins. I assumed it had to do with the truck sitting for as long as it had. Issues with the wipers, blinkers, ABS "buzzing" sounds coming and going until one day the entire instrument cluster went out. No speedo, odometer, warning lights, etc. Tore it apart and found a ton of corrosion on the plugs going into the cluster. Ended up going back to junkyards and pulling out a ton of instrument clusters until I had made my own fully functioning cluster again with almost identical mileage (truck had a little over 156k and new odometer had 158k). Since it was apart I really tore into it and cleaned out all the connections, gently filed off any corrosion I found, and LED swapped lights out. Works great and looks really nice as well. For the other electrical issues the ABS buzzing self healed the more I drove it (no idea how / why, maybe the cleaning helped?) and for the wipers I just twisted the wiper speed knob a bunch and broke up a lot of corrosion inside the knob and now they work fine. Still trying to figure this out but it looks like when the truck was sitting for all those years someone may have left the rear window open because there was a lot of crusty corrosion on many of the internal connectors. Even the back of the OEM radio was looked like it came out of the titanic and no longer worked. Did a lot of cleaning up electrical plugs when I had the dash mostly apart.


After that installed a pillar pod with an autometer tach, and used it as my "dump run / service truck" to pick up a total of three small block ford V8s, tons of axles, and a lot of other junkyard ford parts for my other projects. Truck really grew on me from this point on.

Loading down Uhaul trailers with heavy car parts made me realize that the shocks were completely blown so they were replaced, ended up throwing a check engine light with the codes P171 and P174 which I guess is a common sign in the ranger world that the intake manifold gasket was bad (replaced and codes did not come back), and other than that I have just been restoring / renewing old parts (side steps, OEM rims, bumpers) and modernizing / improving parts of it (exhaust, lights, shell). This is how is currently sits today and it is super close to being done and shipped out to my brother in Hawaii. He plans on keeping this truck and doing his own restoration someday. We both have really started to love these older rangers. Just a great user friendly platform!

I am hoping this is the right place to ask some questions about parts of this truck that have completely stumped me. I have only worked on fords with OBD1 and this is my first OBD2 vehicle. I bought an Xtool D7 scanner just so I can talk to the OBD2 system. This is what has me stumped. I am getting zero communication with the GEM. All the codes thrown are as follows:
Generic Electronic Module (GEM) Fault-9
1. B1434 Please see the vehicle service manual
2. B1431 Please see the vehicle service manual
3. B1428 Safety belt lamp circuit failure
4. B1458 Please see the vehicle service manual
5. B1323 Door ajar warning lamp circuit failure
6. B1840 Wiper front power circuit failure
7. P0500 VSS sensor circuit fault
8. B1352 Ignition key in circuit fault
9. B1347 Please see the vehicle service manual

Is there a way to test the GEM in the truck? Are these code combinations a common sign to replace the GEM? If so where can I even find one 26 years later? Also any time I take apart or replace anything the codes are cleared and these same ones keep coming back. This is really the last big thing I need to diagnose before sending the truck off.

Also I do not know much about the 4.0L reliability wise, performance specs, or even common issues they have. I had a 2002 Explorer for a short amount of time before that infamous death rattle kicked in and took out the 4.0L in that thing. Do the 99 rangers suffer the same fate? It looks like the one in this is a pushrod motor which I would assume would be way better in the long run.

Lastly I found a lot of conflicting tow ratings for these rangers. What is an honest tow rating for this ranger?

Thanks for reading and hope you guys enjoyed this ranger rescue!