The Birth Of The TurboRanger

Alright everyone, sit down, grab a beer, and lets talk about what we have been doing and where we have been.

We have been to the Gambler for 3 years and we are coming up on our fourth year in a week.  Two years ago, we took the Golf back for round two and it…. Met its demise.  Last year, we went the boring route and took an Expedition that was RWD and had mud tires on it so, nothing to write home about.

THIS YEAR THOUGH.  Let me tell you what we are doing this year.  We have one of the coolest vehicles we have ever been able to work on.  It’s a Ford… but its an 84 Ranger body, 86 Thunderbird TurboCoupe 2.3L engine, a Mustang T-5 5 speed transmission, an Explorer 8.8 rear end, and Explorer disk brakes.   

This truck is truly something else and has been a joy to work on and drive.  Now, I know what you guys are thinking, this thing sounds like a really solid vehicle and, you would be correct.  Minus the lack of suspension, being able to see the highway under the pedals, no speedometer, fuel gauge doesn’t work, no power steering, no recovery points, seatbelts that don’t lock, lack of parking brake, and gets somewhere around 3 miles a gallon. 

With all those problems known, we setout to resolve them all before the big event in Crossville, TN.  Most of these things we just… ignored.  We found some old Jeep YJ floormats I had in my garage, so we put those in to cover up the holes in the floorboard.  Speedometer? Eh, who needs it.  No reliable parking brake?  Leave it in gear.  So after we put some lipstick on those pigs we had some real problems to tackle.

We quickly realized that we are not in good enough shape to muscle around a steering column without power steering.  Here came a long process of finding, what I thought would be a simple addition, of finding a power steering pump, pulley, and bracket for this Frankenstein vehicle.  Ford power steering is directly connected to the steering column so here came the question: are we getting a power steering pump for a Ranger or for a Thunderbird?  We ended up having to find a mounting bracket from Canada and have it shipped to us here.  Found a power steering pump at an O’Reilly’s but we could not find a pulley.  Thank you Ford for deciding to use a V-type belt for a very limited time that no one carries in store.  We ended up finding a V-type pulley for a Ford 351 Windsor that we just hoped would fit.  And it did…. It’s a little too large but it fits and it works so we will leave it at that. 

I am a huge fan of lights, if you look at my truck as it is today, I have many lights.  So we went to the Facebook Marketplace and found a Toyota Tacoma chase rack and figured “it should fit…. We will make it fit” so we picked it up and hammered it in place and put ratchet straps on it to secure it to the bed.  We later decided to actually weld this in place but this was the perfect rack to mount some offroad lights. 

4×4 is no longer an option in this truck.  It has been converted into a RWD dirt racing truck.  With the rear end being more heavy duty and the engine being more than what that Ranger was used to, a custom drive shaft was made by Carolina Driveline to put the power to the rear differential.  Fuel tank?  Well, the stock fuel tank would work but instead, there is a 10 gallon fuel cell under the bed just to make it feel like more of a race truck.

We decided to take the truck out on a ‘maiden voyage’ of sorts to Sumter National Forest in Union with one of our buddy’s, Jon, who will also be driving a Ranger.  We spent a good half day out there running trails and picking up trash along the way.  One thing we found out quickly was that new tires were going to be a must.  Sliding a gravel is fun and it did not take much to get this truck sideways around turns.  We decided to go the route we always go and get some mud tires from Tire Recappers (maybe we will get them as a sponsor one day).

Next thing to do was recovery points.  The front and rear bumper were already removed so we were able to weld in some shackle mounts to the front of the frame then attach two shackles to the front.  As for the rear, we put in a Reese trailer hitch and an Ambull shackle hitch for our recovery point there.   

After all of this, we had one final piece to finish this truck up before leaving and that was tuning the ECU.  Oh, by the way, we have a tunable standalone ECU to make all the HRSPRS.  Tuned the engine up, got it running nice and smooth, now we are ready to go.

We are one week out from the big weekend.  We have made some changes in the engine bay to keep water out of the turbo intake to avoid hydro locking.  We are still trying to work out some electrical accessory plugs but we are just about there.  This truck is ready to go and we are counting the minutes until we leave for the Tennessee Gambler 500.  We have a couple new people coming with us this year and cannot wait for them to see what the weekend is like. 

As always; hold my beer, and watch this.

— Princess