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Rebuilding my father's old truck


DaddysTruck

Well-Known Member
Joined
Jul 24, 2014
Messages
168
City
Tennessee
Vehicle Year
1985
Transmission
Manual
My dad passed away in 2014, and after the family basically looted his house, I was left with just about nothing other than this old Ranger to remember him by. It was a neglected vehicle that he had managed to pick up for 300 bucks. It wasn't his main transportation, and from the looks of it he didn't put much work into it other than to keep it going. The previous owner did an okay job painting it white over the original red, but other than that it's an all original 30 year old truck with a lot of maintenance needed. I want to fix it up and make it into something my dad would have been proud of.

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90s red interior.. I hate to change it because it holds memories, but I know he would have liked it fixed up. I decided to start stripping it out and convert it to black. It has the 60/40 split bench. I believe I will be able to mount some black leather buckets to the existing rails.

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The door panels had been wrapped in what looked like a red bed sheet material. I bought some vinyl leather and cheap board to make some new panels. I plan to replace the broken arm rests with black ones from a 67 Mustang. Also going to try to add some more detail to the door panels at some point.

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My dad's tablet was another item I was able to get. I figured since the CD player wasn't working, it would be fitting to use it as a head unit. Not sure how this is going in yet. I'm still brainstorming on what to do with the dash.

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The floor pans are rusted out all the way through in some spots. There's been a leak of rain water into the cab for some time now. I believe it may be coming from the clogged cowl. Working on getting that figured out, and then get what I need to replace the pans.
 
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It has the 2.8 liter carburated v6. It looks like an oil explosion happened under the hood. Everything is caked in a concrete like mixture of oil and red dirt.

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The battery in it was very small, and not the right type for the truck. First thing I did was buy a proper battery and built new cables out of some nice 2 gauge wire. Old wires on the left, new and improved wires on the right in the pic.

I took it to have emission testing done and it failed miserably. All levels were way too high. The catalyctic converter was completely blown out. I bought a new one from Eastern off Rock Auto and replaced it. I took the fact that there was a stick holding parts of the carb together as a sign it needed to be rebuilt as well.

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It was in really bad shape. Took me 3 days of free time to clean it up and rebuild it.

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I really had no idea how to set anything on the feedback carb other than the idle air screws and I still don't yet. It ran well though when it was all together. I took it in for emissions testing again. It passed everything this time except hydrocarbons. First test showed 2000ppm, after the new cat and carb rebuild it was 900ppm, better but not good enough.

I bought a code reader and found that it had a long list of trouble codes. While sorting through those issues I found things that had been badly rigged up, bare wires exposed all over the wire harness, and broken/plugged vacuum lines. At this point I didn't feel comfortable just getting it to pass emissions. I had already started to take some things apart, so might as well do a full overhaul.

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I picked up some supplies and began cleaning and rebuilding the engine wiring harness and vacuum harness. There were tons of exposed wires and broken vacuum lines. Everything was covered in thick oil sludge. I spent several days bringing these parts back to like new condition. I opted to replace all of the wire loom because cleaning it would have been ridiculous. In the condition it was all in, it's surprising the truck ran at all.

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A definite source of vacuum leak was the old brake booster. I could hear it hissing inside the cabin while driving before I started the overhaul.

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I got a Cardone reman off of RockAuto for a good price. It was pretty easy to install with no need to bleed the brakes. It did start rusting through the silver paint quick

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Cleaning has been by far the most time cosuming job.

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When it's all done, and the whole engine bay shines like new, it will all be worth it.

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Engine tear down begins. I bought a full gasket kit with new valve seals and everything. Once I get it down to just the block, it's coming out and going on the stand.

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I'm not sure of the full paint scheme yet, but I knew I wanted the valve covers Ford Blue. Also my daughter who we found out was coming just one month after my dad passed. He never even got to know he was a grandpa.

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Wire wheeled the heck out of the vacuum resiviour to get all of the rust off and painted. Like new.
 
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BODY - WHEELS - SUSPENSION

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I don't know about the raked look on a 4wd truck. Just looks weird to me. It was due for some new tires any way, so I got some 31's put on there. Evened it out a little better.

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I would like to get the front lifted up more. I've found 2 inch aluminum spacers for the front springs on Ebay. It really needs at least 3 inches of lift. I might settle for the spacers so it is at least close to level if I can't figure out what else to do.
 
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Glad to see a Gen 1 being brought back to life. Interesting in seeing how you manage to get the tablet to function properly.
 
It's just an idea at this point. I keep telling myself it would be so much easier to just install a regular headunit, but I really want to get it done. I'm going to try to run a power wire from an accessory switched source to a USB jack that I can plug it into. All hidden away so it looks really clean. For audio I'm installing a 5 channel amp that I will run the tablet to directly with an auxiliary-jack-to-RCA cable. I can fiberglass a mount to fit the tablet into on the dash, and my best idea at this point is to use magnets, so I can quickly put it in and take it out. There seems to be some promising apps that are made to use an Android device for a headunit in the car, so I think it will turn out nice. Long road ahead though.
 
I don't know much about tablets but I know magnets are not great around computers.

It is a darn clean little truck.

As for the oily mess... as far as I know it is a 2.8 thing. One nice thing is it keeps the engine crossmember and axle beams from rusting :icon_idea: (mine still had minty fresh black paint after I washed the crud off)
 
I really hope I can get it to stop leaking out. I'm in the middle of overhauling the motor now, and the vast majority of my time is spent wire wheeling oily gunk off of everything. If it gets all filthy again I'm going to lose it.
 
Project is coming along. I spent a good part of my day off today cleaning up the engine bay. Who knew all of that color was under there? As soon as I get the motor out I will be able to clean all of the oil sludge off of the firewall and really knock it out. I was planning on painting the bay black, but I'm kind of digging the original red paint.

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Before
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Got some fresh parts for the motor. Plugs, wires, rotor, cap, 02 sensor, and thermostat.

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My amp kit came in from KnuConcepts. They also had the RCA cable I needed to connect the tablet with my amp.

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Working on getting all my interior pieces painted black.

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Harbor Freight special ready to go

I just need a crane!

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Worked on the cab floor today. I scraped most of the old sound deadening material up. It wasn't as bad as I expected underneath. I don't think I'll even have to get a floor pan for the passengers side. Just needs treatment and a couple holes patched and it will be good to go. The drivers side is a bit worse.

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I scraped, wire wheeled, and cleaned. I'm going to treat the remaining rust with naval jelly and then cover with rust reformer. After that I'll get it all patched up.

I can't take all of the credit, I had some help.

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I spent some time deep cleaning and restoring all of the original seat belts. I don't imagine they had been cleaned in the past 30 years of use, so they were pretty disgusting. Also repainted all of the rusty buckles.

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