My Ranger

This page is dedicated to my truck. It is a 1984 Ford Ranger and I have owned it 2 years now. When I bought the truck it had a very tired 4 cylinder. Within a half a year, the 4 cylinder began running on only 3 cylinders. After another few months, it had worked its way down to 2. This was not good. I spent a couple months trying to find a newer 4 cylinder in the papers to replace the original with, no luck. In July of 1995, I went on a rather long road trip (I stole my mom's car for this) and it was during this trip that I made a decision. I decided to not only replace the engine but to set up a challenge for myself.

"What was the challenge?" you ask?

Ah, the challenge was:

• to squeeze a V-8 in a 1984 Ranger engine bay
• to mate a T-5, 5 speed transmission to that V-8
• to setup the truck to get at least 20 miles per gallon on the highway
• to get this done before graduation.

These have been my goals since July 1995. At the end of july I bought this engine:

from my friend, Dan Anschuetz. He had bought my 1966 Ford Mustang from me a couple years prior to this (my first car) which he was going to use for parts. He never got around to using the 289cu. in. V-8 which was in the car so I bought it back.

Then I started the long process of disassembling the Ranger and procuring more parts. Here are some photos taken at various states along the way.

That is all I have on the net for now. I have some more photos but they either haven't been developed yet or they haven't been scanned in yet. Either way, this is all I have access to on the computer for now.

In case you were wondering, the Ranger did work for a couple weeks, then a couple seals broke in the engine so I need to remove the engine and do a complete overhaul. But, it did run. It has a 289 cu.in. V-8, a T-5 5 speed manual transmission, a 2.70:1 rearend, and got about 22mpg on the highway (even though I was continually stopping to replace the oil which was flowing onto the road through the busted seal) when I drove it from Virginia to Georgia (with the hope of having it pass inspection and get registered in Georgia).

So, I would say I met most of my goals. I just need to do some more work in order to re-meet my goals.

Time to go back to my source page.