New to us '97

[jrny4rbys]

Just an intro of sorts...
So my 16yo son bought himself a project. Neighbor had a 1997 parked in the yard and he bought it for $400 bucks! 4.0L V6 / Manual / 4wd / 206K miles
It runs, but runs rough. And it's quite underpowered.
The coolant reservoir fills up with coolant, boiling, then as the truck cools, it drains (somewhere)
Clutch requires quite the push to engage gears.
Gonna do a compression test, just to see where to start.

He bought it knowing it's a project, so it looks like he got what he wanted! Looking forward to all the good help on this site.

 

[SenorNoob]

That about the best of the rangers for options and working on it yourself. If it's not already bad from abuse that 4.0 can hit half a million miles. I just swapped one May of last year that still ran great and drove ok (It was very weak) with 485,000.

Looks like it has a clean body. That's the hardest part IMO. Mechanical I can do. Bodywork? Nope!