kishy's 1985 Ranger

[packman]

Whoa!!! That's a lot of work! In the cold to boot. Hats off to you!

[gadget73]

if you want a more unfair comparison, my '11 Silverado 1500 with its 4.8 liter ball of fury does about 16.5 on the highway, and thats a 2.5 ton 4wd with no variable displacement. In town its right in the low 14 range. The S10 with it's 4.3 did 17,5 under basically any operating condition you could name.

if I had a 4 cyl ranger doing 16.5, that 4 cyl would get thrown off a cliff and it would be a 302 swap. If its going to have lousy fuel economy its going to make better noise than a Pinto engine is capable of.

I would actually like to find a boxy Ranger to shove a 5.0 into, mostly because I have one sitting around

[DerekTheGreat]

More air... more fuel... more power... less pedal needed to do the same work...

Yeah that makes sense. I've never gotten better fuel economy in the winter. Either we get winter gas or just that I tend to let the thing idle a bit more are to blame.

if you want a more unfair comparison, my '11 Silverado 1500 with its 4.8 liter ball of fury does about 16.5 on the highway, and thats a 2.5 ton 4wd with no variable displacement. In town its right in the low 14 range. The S10 with it's 4.3 did 17,5 under basically any operating condition you could name.

if I had a 4 cyl ranger doing 16.5, that 4 cyl would get thrown off a cliff and it would be a 302 swap. If its going to have lousy fuel economy its going to make better noise than a Pinto engine is capable of.

I would actually like to find a boxy Ranger to shove a 5.0 into, mostly because I have one sitting around

Wow, I'm surprised my old turd does better than a modern one.

Ah, the 4.3. "Six cylinder performance with the economy of an eight cylinder."

My Ranger was a turd, but I miss it. Caymen green like 97% of all the other Rangers sold in '94. If I could find another clean one with a 3.0 and a five speed for cheap, I'd like to have it.

[Tiggie]

I hate the internal slave of my M5OD. Good research and engineering to get around that with your setup.

[gadget73]

Wow, I'm surprised my old turd does better than a modern one.

Ah, the 4.3. "Six cylinder performance with the economy of an eight cylinder."

The 5.3 is actually less piggy, partly from the AFM, but also taller gears and a little more torque at the bottom. 3.08 vs I think 3.42? A lot of them also got the 6 speed, I have the four speed 4L60E. Basically they penalize you for taking the cheaper engine by making it cost more. Until you account for the self-destructing camshaft nonsense then it ends up washing out. Fair bet a GMT900 weighs more and has worse aero too. That tall, flat front is like pushing a 2.5 ton brick down the highway.

and yeah the 4.3 was not thrifty. Ran great and had all the power you can really make use of in a 2wd 3800 lb vehicle with no weight over the drive axle though. People put stupidly powerful engines in Rangers and S10's but it doesn't really make any sense. The 4.3 was good for 175 hp and like 250 ft-lb. It would blow the tires off like nobody's business and chirp second gear reliably. Beyond stock HO power levels I think it would get too sketchy to actually be useful as a driver without doing things that make it not useful as a truck.

[DerekTheGreat]

Yah, 175HP/275 ft-lbs is good enough for me, especially in an S10. The 310? ft-lbs available in my K1500 is sometimes too much, always wants to break the rear tire loose. Irritating in rain (more so now that my tires are starting to harden up) and just about useless in the snow, it must be put in 4x4 unless you want to go insane from going nowhere.

Jeez, I'd have thought that is the whole point to the "economical" drivetrain- fuel efficiency. Least that's how they marketed it back in the day and what it was over the other offerings. I do like the 5.3, the Tahoe has one along with 3.73's. It really scoots when you ask it to and still keeps up with any vehicle. However, it is pretty turd like on fuel. I think the best I managed with it was 17.xx mpg on the highway, low 17's that is. Everyone shits on the 4L60E, but I like that one. It's got almost 300k on it and shifts great. Hasn't been rebuilt. Just had to do the oil pick up o-ring deal on the 5.3 through. Learning about LS engines.. And to think I just thought the lifters were noisy on start-up due to old(ish) age and mileage. Nope. Good god, she's been driving it that way for three years without an issue and the damn thing still doesn't burn oil with nearly 300k on it. Hopefully it'll go another 100k now. But I think it's a damn fine engine, especially to endure all that abuse.

[kishy]

This past Friday, I asked a friend with a hoist to put the Ranger in the air so I could try to improve an exhaust leak around a band clamp and also just generally put eyes on the bottom side of the truck in preparation for a possible road trip the following day.

Packed the band clamp with RTV and this worked nicely. There are other leaking joints but this was the loudest and most annoying.

















It would appear the leak around the slip yoke is back. Not sure I care about it anymore now that I've found an oil for this trans that isn't ludicrously expensive.

[kishy]

Splitting into 2 replies for sanity reasons:

The following day, which is now yesterday, I set off with my friend Dan on a mission: he recently bought a car that needs a subframe, and owns another car that needs a good catalytic converter, and found that a person he had previously dealt with in IL had both of these items available. The party with the subframe and cat was in the market for an EV battery (Chevy Volt) and had located one in Ann Arbor MI, which would be on our path to get the subframe.





We drove to Ann Arbor, picked up the EV battery, then delivered it to the guy in IL and picked up the subframe and cat. Dan drove about 60% of the trip. We tried to stick to 70mph as close as possible for as much of the trip as possible. The round trip was 715 miles or 1151 kilometres and the truck averaged 21 US MPG for the trip, based on actual distance travelled per Google Maps. The odometer was short by about 13 miles over the actual trip distance, which is insignificant.



One license plate light did not survive the trip; vibration or potholes broke the outer lens part off. These are Dorman replacement parts new fairly recently.





For what it is, the truck drove great and didn't skip a beat. It's a POS but a lovable one.

[DerekTheGreat]

"It's a POS but a lovable one." My favorite kind of car/truck.

21 mpg on the highway is respectable. The lower numbers you reported before could probably be improved by modifying your shift strategy around town, those engines don't mind winging and prefer it to lugging.

[kishy]

"It's a POS but a lovable one." My favorite kind of car/truck.

21 mpg on the highway is respectable. The lower numbers you reported before could probably be improved by modifying your shift strategy around town, those engines don't mind winging and prefer it to lugging.

I typically wind out the gears pretty high, with the exception of 1-2 (that's a difficult shift to make smoothly on this trans).
Just did some more math after topping off the tank and came to an interesting realization.

For the leg of the drive that I did, which was from roughly Benton Harbor back home, the truck got almost 20MPG.

A significant amount of that distance was spent at 10-20MPH higher than when Dan was driving.

Losing about 1MPG for 10+MPH is easily worth it. I figured I would have seen 16MPG for the part I drove.

[kishy]

For the last "good little while", the Ranger's brakes have been a little less than great. It developed a pull to the right when braking heavily, and felt more or less like the front left was not contributing at all. I've been intentionally rough on the brakes trying to free up what I figured might be a sticky caliper slide without success. It remained safe to drive as long as the driver is prepared to firmly hold the wheel while braking, otherwise you're going to end up off in the right side ditch.

I more or less wanted nothing to do with actually troubleshooting this, but the problem seems to have been seized slides (absolutely idiotic design on these) and also a possibly seized caliper piston on the left side. The left side rotor looked like it hadn't had pad contact in a year.

I bought a pair of reman calipers with new slides and took my rotors to my friend's machine shop where he resurfaced them on the lathe. These rotors were new in 2015 and look thin due to casting defects (never buy new rotors if you still have OEM and they're within specs - machining them is 100% worth it) but actually measured to exactly the correct spec for still being new rotors.



Blew the old grease out of the bearings and repacked them, reused all 4 bearings (took care to keep them with their wear-matched races) and the seals since they all seemed reasonable. I "resurfaced" the pads by rubbing them on my concrete driveway until they had a fresh looking surface, then slapped it all together. Bleeding was super painless as I had tied up the flex hoses before leaving to the machine shop (calipers absent from truck due to already being turned in at the store as cores) and the fluid mostly stayed in the system.





I would not say that the brakes feel good, but the fronts are definitely both working evenly and there is no pull. It doesn't stop as well as the wagon, but it also has a lot less brake surface area.

[gadget73]

I really wonder why they used this slider setup instead of the pins like most of the cars seemed to have used. The pins rarely give any trouble.

[kishy]

Several of my vehicles have given me issues relating to windshield wiper performance that new blades of various designs haven't cured. Noise, leaving water behind, appearing to skip sections of the windshield, flapping in the wind. The Ranger doesn't have the issue of the Panthers where the wipers over-travel, but it did have most of those issues. My friend suggested this was probably due to poor spring tension on the wiper arm.

Box Panther wiper arms are reproduced by Dorman and available everywhere-ish, but early Rangers are not as easy. I did eventually realize that LMC Truck carries a wiper arm for the early Ranger, and it isn't horribly expensive at 18 USD each. I ordered a pair of them (PN 50-8010 each) as well as a couple of our Panther dome light lenses (PN 47-4291 each).



The new arms are a direct fit as they should be, with a subtle difference in the angle of the wiper blade vs the angle of the arm, but very functional. They do apply more tension as measured using a cheap kitchen scale with the wipers parked:

Driver old 670g / new 740g
Passenger old 597g / new 805g



Just need to wait for some rain to properly test them out.

I'm also toning down the decal mess, and have removed the front auxiliary lighting in favour of putting something better and cleaner on instead.

[clutch47]

I've used LMC replacement arms on my truck and they worked well. The springs got weak on the originals and they did exactly the same thing yours was doing.
. The kitchen scale idea is pretty trick man..

[gadget73]

I had a lot of arm skipping on the Continental, chased it to the connector bushing things that join the sections of linkage together. Looks more or less like a wire nut pressed through the bar. Its the same thing used on Mustangs, and Panthers have one too. Changed that and about 90% of the problem went away. Arms may be the rest of it, but if I swap it that will be to replace the aftermarket shiny ones for black. The originals were black, but took some very bonkers wiper blade that is NLA. These have the common U hook at the end, but if the sun hits the chrome its absolutely blinding. I'm guessing I can use Mustang arms.