- Joined
- Feb 7, 2026
- Messages
- 31
- Points
- 101
- Age
- 22
- City
- Golden
- State - Country
- CO - USA
- Vehicle Year
- 1994
- Vehicle
- Ford Ranger
- Drive
- 4WD
- Engine
- 4.0 V6
- Transmission
- Manual
- Tire Size
- 235/75R15
For reference, I have a 1994 Ranger XLT 4x4 with 195,000 miles on it. It has the original OHV 4.0, what I believe is the original push button operated transfer case, and what I thought was the original 5 speed manual transmission. It has the right code for a transmission from the year range for a 1994, but it also has what looks like a junkyard paint penned 88-11 written on it, which I believe is the entire year range for the 4.0 version of the M5OD-R1. To further add to the mystery, the previous owner told me when I bought it last May that it was parked 9 years before. But the tags expired in 2009 - 16 years before. And I'm pretty sure he would have had the tags redone before he paid someone to swap the transmission, but if it is in fact dated to several years after the tags expired... He also didn't mention anything about the transmission, but he did say that he had just had a clutch put in it not too long before he parked it for its significant oil leaks. It feels like the synchronizers are pretty well shot in at least the first two or three gears so I don't think it has been rebuilt. But double clutching on downshifts was already a habit from learning on my roommate's TJ with a worn out AX15, so the only real inconvenience is having to time traffic lights so that I have the clutch disengaged before the other side's light turns red. My shifter boot is loose so I can plainly hear the whir as the input shaft slows down, and it won't go into gear until after it stops.
It is on $80 P235/75R15XL Dextero DAT1 A/T tires that I got on sale for $72 each. The stock size on my door sticker is 265/75R15. I had to put tires on it before I got it running so I cheaped out just in case the truck turned into a nightmare and I had to scrap it to try and break even. If I had to do it over knowing that it would work out I would splurge for the 31x10.5R15LT size for the extra $52/tire. I told the guy I'd buy it a few hours before he was planning to call a scrapper that had already offered him $500 before I went and looked at it. He didn't want to see it parted out and scrapped so he let me match the $500 offer since I wanted to put it back on the road.
It has a good inch of the "Ranger Lean" and the rear leaf springs are flat even with nothing in the bed except the camper shell, so the suspension is thoroughly worn out. The previous owner bought it in 1999 and he used it heavily as a work truck. The shocks were barely holding on before the trip and they were well on the way to being blown out by the end of the first trail. It now rocks like a keelless canoe. They're Gabriel Pro Ryder Premium Gas Truck Shocks, and in a brief search while waiting for my tires to reinflate in town the newest reference that I could find to them was a 2003 forum post about putting them on an Explorer.
The only "modifications" are that one of the two previous owners converted it to Warn manual locking hubs and I stuck the front sway bar in the bed for the duration of the trails.
Prior to starting the Hell's Revenge trail I only had about a couple of hours of driver's seat trail time, split about 50/50 between my Ranger and my Roommate's parents' stock TJ that they still don't know I took down an unmaintained rough dirt road in a borderline blizzard last March. Most of that time was on little more than a dirt road and none of it was on anything that I would consider technically difficult. But I had been on the Spring Break trip to Moab three times prior as a passenger.
This trip started, as all good long road trips do, with doing relatively major work on the truck given what I was about to ask of it. The group I was going with left Saturday morning, but the FedEx shipment of my new 3 row all aluminum eBay radiator got delayed by a couple of days outside of Savanah, GA. I was hoping that it would cure my issue with overheating when going up hills. If it didn't my roommate and I were going to head for Yellowstone in his Chevy. The radiator came Sunday morning. The holes for the bottom clips for the fan shroud were in the wrong spots so I had to drill a few holes in the shroud and use zip ties to attach it to the radiator. I put it everything back together and bled the cooling system a bit, and then my roommate and I piled all of our stuff into the bed and drove 10 miles up I-70 with a couple thousand feet of elevation gain. This was at about 2 PM. It didn't overheat and nothing looked wrong, so I headed west and next stopped in Grand Junction after driving about 250 miles over what's probably the hardest section of interstate in the country. I bought gas and noticed this puddle and its runoff. I knew it came from me and it smelled like antifreeze, but I couldn't find the leak aside from a weird wet spot on the outside of the shroud so I chose to ignore it. This is when we finally dug out the earplugs. My A/C doesn't work and it's been hot around here, so we had the windows down for the whole trip. My ears are still ringing a little more loudly than normal over a week later and that was the only highway stint for which I didn't wear earplugs.
Anyway, on to the interesting stuff.
Everyone else ran the Top of the World trail Sunday and they found a campsite that they liked most of the way back down to the old Dewey Bridge, so we went up there and camped with them. The next morning we drove to Moab, set up camp in the Sand Flats Recreation Area, and then went around the corner and hit Hell's Revenge. We had two lifted Tacomas, a built up 4 door Jeep on 37s, me, and a Honda CR-V with a manual transmission and AWD but no low range on 215/75R15 A/T Falken tires.
Here's a shot of the group that the guy driving the Jeep took. These are all our daily drivers, and as far as I'm aware none of us have any easy substitutes for them.
We only had to winch the CR-V once and that was primarily done to save his clutch on a rocky climb. Here's what that climb looked like over my hood with a couple of people for scale. I went up it just past where the guy in the blue shirt is standing. This was the first climb where I scratched and dented a cross member or a skid plate, but it was far from the last one of the trip.
While they were winching him up I noticed that there was a puddle of coolant under my front end again. I discovered that the O-ring on the drain plug in my new radiator was being pushed out by the coolant pressure, which explained why it had quit leaking by the time I started looking for a leak in Grand Junction. It was squirting up and over, which also explained why it looked like it was coming out of nowhere on the shroud. I used a zip tie as a "temporary" fix. It's still on there.
One of the Tacomas and the Jeep ran Hell's Gate. I wanted to try it, 29" tires and all, but I didn't quite trust that I would make it back up unassisted and I couldn't come up with a good place to hook a winch to it. Nothing seemed like a good place between the factory bumper, that front crossmember that hangs down under the radiator to protect the steering linkage, and the axle beams.
For those that don't know, Hell's Gate is a steep V notch. What a lot of people don't realize until they get there is that you have to descend another V notch that's at least this steep and long in order to come back up the actual obstacle. The whole thing is optional, but once you're down there there is no bypass. This is the Jeep on 37" tires from our group.
The guy standing in the middle was running the trail with his wife alone in their Jeep, so they joined our group instead of passing us while we were winching the CR-V. Come to find out he and his wife lived just outside of Chattanooga until they went to RVing full time a few years ago. I grew up just outside of Chattanooga in a different direction, a lot of my family is still in that area, and I have my Ranger registered there. He was filming and spotting at the time, he wasn't just loitering there on his phone.
Most of the rest of the trail was relatively uneventful except for ripping this air deflector thing loose by repeatedly hitting it on rocks. A while back I thought that I should remove it before I did any serious wheeling in case it was worth selling or keeping around for highway gas mileage, but I forgot before this trip.
Almost within sight of the end of the trail is this drop. I ran it blind and took a bad line, and to keep from potentially rolling I cut hard right and hit the gas. In the video from my dash you can feel the whole truck start to slide downhill to the right, so I don't think I overreacted. It did keep the rubber side down, but I put a fist sized dent in my already bent front bumper in the process. That and the plastic thing were the only cosmetic victims of my decision to run Hell's Revenge, which is usually rated at about a 6 in difficulty, with 29" tires and no lift or lockers. I bypassed Hell's Gate, Escalator, the Staircase, all of the hot tubs, and everything after the fairly new Staircase exit. I probably would have tried the Staircase, but the only time I've ridden up that one the fairly modified LJ that I was riding in came what felt like the closest I've ever been to rolling. That's including the time on the waterfall obstacle on Flat Iron Mesa where they tied off the heavily modified XJ that I was riding in from the top because multiple people were worried that it was about to go over backwards.
The CR-V on that drop:
The dent I put in the bumper:
And here's a shot of everyone except the CR-V on Baby Lion's Back.
We also did part of Fins & Things as a night run, Sevenmile Rim (including Wipeout Hill), Hurrah Pass, and part of Chicken Corners. But my computer is starting to complain for now. I also have a few videos of the Ranger, but not many since I was driving it and I only got out my drone once during lunch one day.
Overall I was pretty impressed with how the Ranger did for being stock and having cheap tires. Especially since I'm probably only about $2,000 or a little more into it including buying it, taxes, tags, tires, parts, fluids, and everything like that. Throughout the entire trip I put it everywhere that that rear Tacoma in the last picture went except for I believe 3 occasions. As I recall they were Staircase, one that I didn't think I had the ground clearance for, and one where I didn't have enough tire for a ledge. I even crawled right up the exact line that he had just struggled on a moment prior a couple of times. But he had Mickey Thompson tires, and I've heard that those aren't all that great on slickrock.
I wasn't sure whether this should go here or in the Tailgate, so I erred on the side of this falling under "Show of your trucks." I have more pictures of the Ranger from the later trails, and at this rate this will probably eventually either turn into or spin off a build thread. Now that I've seen what it can do, both on trails and on long highway stretches, I have a better idea of where I would like to go from here. I just don't have the time, the money, or the room needed to go with the ideas.
It is on $80 P235/75R15XL Dextero DAT1 A/T tires that I got on sale for $72 each. The stock size on my door sticker is 265/75R15. I had to put tires on it before I got it running so I cheaped out just in case the truck turned into a nightmare and I had to scrap it to try and break even. If I had to do it over knowing that it would work out I would splurge for the 31x10.5R15LT size for the extra $52/tire. I told the guy I'd buy it a few hours before he was planning to call a scrapper that had already offered him $500 before I went and looked at it. He didn't want to see it parted out and scrapped so he let me match the $500 offer since I wanted to put it back on the road.
It has a good inch of the "Ranger Lean" and the rear leaf springs are flat even with nothing in the bed except the camper shell, so the suspension is thoroughly worn out. The previous owner bought it in 1999 and he used it heavily as a work truck. The shocks were barely holding on before the trip and they were well on the way to being blown out by the end of the first trail. It now rocks like a keelless canoe. They're Gabriel Pro Ryder Premium Gas Truck Shocks, and in a brief search while waiting for my tires to reinflate in town the newest reference that I could find to them was a 2003 forum post about putting them on an Explorer.
The only "modifications" are that one of the two previous owners converted it to Warn manual locking hubs and I stuck the front sway bar in the bed for the duration of the trails.
Prior to starting the Hell's Revenge trail I only had about a couple of hours of driver's seat trail time, split about 50/50 between my Ranger and my Roommate's parents' stock TJ that they still don't know I took down an unmaintained rough dirt road in a borderline blizzard last March. Most of that time was on little more than a dirt road and none of it was on anything that I would consider technically difficult. But I had been on the Spring Break trip to Moab three times prior as a passenger.
This trip started, as all good long road trips do, with doing relatively major work on the truck given what I was about to ask of it. The group I was going with left Saturday morning, but the FedEx shipment of my new 3 row all aluminum eBay radiator got delayed by a couple of days outside of Savanah, GA. I was hoping that it would cure my issue with overheating when going up hills. If it didn't my roommate and I were going to head for Yellowstone in his Chevy. The radiator came Sunday morning. The holes for the bottom clips for the fan shroud were in the wrong spots so I had to drill a few holes in the shroud and use zip ties to attach it to the radiator. I put it everything back together and bled the cooling system a bit, and then my roommate and I piled all of our stuff into the bed and drove 10 miles up I-70 with a couple thousand feet of elevation gain. This was at about 2 PM. It didn't overheat and nothing looked wrong, so I headed west and next stopped in Grand Junction after driving about 250 miles over what's probably the hardest section of interstate in the country. I bought gas and noticed this puddle and its runoff. I knew it came from me and it smelled like antifreeze, but I couldn't find the leak aside from a weird wet spot on the outside of the shroud so I chose to ignore it. This is when we finally dug out the earplugs. My A/C doesn't work and it's been hot around here, so we had the windows down for the whole trip. My ears are still ringing a little more loudly than normal over a week later and that was the only highway stint for which I didn't wear earplugs.
Anyway, on to the interesting stuff.
Everyone else ran the Top of the World trail Sunday and they found a campsite that they liked most of the way back down to the old Dewey Bridge, so we went up there and camped with them. The next morning we drove to Moab, set up camp in the Sand Flats Recreation Area, and then went around the corner and hit Hell's Revenge. We had two lifted Tacomas, a built up 4 door Jeep on 37s, me, and a Honda CR-V with a manual transmission and AWD but no low range on 215/75R15 A/T Falken tires.
Here's a shot of the group that the guy driving the Jeep took. These are all our daily drivers, and as far as I'm aware none of us have any easy substitutes for them.
We only had to winch the CR-V once and that was primarily done to save his clutch on a rocky climb. Here's what that climb looked like over my hood with a couple of people for scale. I went up it just past where the guy in the blue shirt is standing. This was the first climb where I scratched and dented a cross member or a skid plate, but it was far from the last one of the trip.
While they were winching him up I noticed that there was a puddle of coolant under my front end again. I discovered that the O-ring on the drain plug in my new radiator was being pushed out by the coolant pressure, which explained why it had quit leaking by the time I started looking for a leak in Grand Junction. It was squirting up and over, which also explained why it looked like it was coming out of nowhere on the shroud. I used a zip tie as a "temporary" fix. It's still on there.
One of the Tacomas and the Jeep ran Hell's Gate. I wanted to try it, 29" tires and all, but I didn't quite trust that I would make it back up unassisted and I couldn't come up with a good place to hook a winch to it. Nothing seemed like a good place between the factory bumper, that front crossmember that hangs down under the radiator to protect the steering linkage, and the axle beams.
For those that don't know, Hell's Gate is a steep V notch. What a lot of people don't realize until they get there is that you have to descend another V notch that's at least this steep and long in order to come back up the actual obstacle. The whole thing is optional, but once you're down there there is no bypass. This is the Jeep on 37" tires from our group.
The guy standing in the middle was running the trail with his wife alone in their Jeep, so they joined our group instead of passing us while we were winching the CR-V. Come to find out he and his wife lived just outside of Chattanooga until they went to RVing full time a few years ago. I grew up just outside of Chattanooga in a different direction, a lot of my family is still in that area, and I have my Ranger registered there. He was filming and spotting at the time, he wasn't just loitering there on his phone.
Most of the rest of the trail was relatively uneventful except for ripping this air deflector thing loose by repeatedly hitting it on rocks. A while back I thought that I should remove it before I did any serious wheeling in case it was worth selling or keeping around for highway gas mileage, but I forgot before this trip.
Almost within sight of the end of the trail is this drop. I ran it blind and took a bad line, and to keep from potentially rolling I cut hard right and hit the gas. In the video from my dash you can feel the whole truck start to slide downhill to the right, so I don't think I overreacted. It did keep the rubber side down, but I put a fist sized dent in my already bent front bumper in the process. That and the plastic thing were the only cosmetic victims of my decision to run Hell's Revenge, which is usually rated at about a 6 in difficulty, with 29" tires and no lift or lockers. I bypassed Hell's Gate, Escalator, the Staircase, all of the hot tubs, and everything after the fairly new Staircase exit. I probably would have tried the Staircase, but the only time I've ridden up that one the fairly modified LJ that I was riding in came what felt like the closest I've ever been to rolling. That's including the time on the waterfall obstacle on Flat Iron Mesa where they tied off the heavily modified XJ that I was riding in from the top because multiple people were worried that it was about to go over backwards.
The CR-V on that drop:
The dent I put in the bumper:
And here's a shot of everyone except the CR-V on Baby Lion's Back.
We also did part of Fins & Things as a night run, Sevenmile Rim (including Wipeout Hill), Hurrah Pass, and part of Chicken Corners. But my computer is starting to complain for now. I also have a few videos of the Ranger, but not many since I was driving it and I only got out my drone once during lunch one day.
Overall I was pretty impressed with how the Ranger did for being stock and having cheap tires. Especially since I'm probably only about $2,000 or a little more into it including buying it, taxes, tags, tires, parts, fluids, and everything like that. Throughout the entire trip I put it everywhere that that rear Tacoma in the last picture went except for I believe 3 occasions. As I recall they were Staircase, one that I didn't think I had the ground clearance for, and one where I didn't have enough tire for a ledge. I even crawled right up the exact line that he had just struggled on a moment prior a couple of times. But he had Mickey Thompson tires, and I've heard that those aren't all that great on slickrock.
I wasn't sure whether this should go here or in the Tailgate, so I erred on the side of this falling under "Show of your trucks." I have more pictures of the Ranger from the later trails, and at this rate this will probably eventually either turn into or spin off a build thread. Now that I've seen what it can do, both on trails and on long highway stretches, I have a better idea of where I would like to go from here. I just don't have the time, the money, or the room needed to go with the ideas.
