WILL IT RUN?? Reviving the Cheapest 4x4 Ranger I could find!!! (Its not pretty folks)

[Applause] hey guys how's it going welcome back to diesel creek my name is matt this is a 1988 ford ranger that i've been sitting on for 10 months and haven't touched and today we're going to drag it into the shop and see what we can do with this thing so as i said had it 10 months it's been sitting in this spot and unfortunately i just have not had the time to start on this thing i paid 500 for this thing off of facebook marketplace i drove like three hours over into ohio to find this thing came off the interstate got off the off ramp onto a dirt road that's that was a first for me i mean i'm pretty for more familiar with rural areas i like to be in rural areas but i've never come off the interstate onto a dirt road that was that was something new when i went and picked this thing up but the reason i picked it up and drove so far for it was because i like this body style ford ranger as a lot of you guys know ford ranger was my very first truck i still have my very first one and in some previous videos i mentioned that i needed to save it because i was going to use some parts off of it for another ranger project this is said project the other reason i picked this thing up is because it's pretty solid for the year i feel like i'm always repeating that in videos about vehicles in our area they tend to rot away this is western pennsylvania and they dump thousands and thousands of tons of salt on the road every year to in their minds prevent ice which i mean i guess it does it just i would rather just have ice than not have a vehicle in five years but this guy seems to be a pretty good survivor i did think it was in a little bit better shape when i picked it up after i got it home i looked at it a little bit better found some areas that are a little bit rougher and we'll discuss that a little bit later in the video but right now let's get this thing drug into the shop because for 500 it doesn't run what fun would this video be if the thing ran anyways we don't want something that just cranks right up with a key no we got a wrench on it for three days and then when i started it'll have a belt squeal everything i own has a belt squeal i don't know what's up with that [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] hey all right we got her wedged in here in this nice big shop i've got but it's better than laying outside in the wet gravel so here's what i know about this thing i'm supposedly the third owner of this truck the guy i got it from got it off the original owner that had passed away and the original owner had taken pretty good care of it and done some bodywork previously to it there's a little ding down here in the cab corner i can see that it's got putty in it so i'm pretty sure these cab corners have been redone they got a little bit of blistering under them again so they really would need redone if you're going to try and make this a show truck i'm not sure entirely which direction i'm headed with this truck as i said earlier it does not run the gentleman i got it from insisted that all it needed was a secondary fuel pump that sits in the frame rail up here these earlier rangers had two whereas that 91 ranger that i have in previous videos just has the in-tank pump so again 10 months and i haven't looked at this thing i have noticed there's a rag back here on top of the fuel tank or something and i believe he told me he had had that sending unit in and out so we're gonna pull the bed off and get a look underneath there and see what he's got going uh he threw the tank on yeah he doesn't even have the fuel neck in here he threw the tank or the bed he threw the bed on it for me to come pick it up uh you can see it's got a really nice bucket bench seat here it's got that nice sag tour the steering wheel is probably one of the grossest steering wheels i've ever seen it's got about 35 something 30 something years of nastiness built up on it but i like these old interiors the dash pad is cracked up a bit but i like the gauge layout kind of this almost reminds me of a bronco an early bronco gauge because it's got three gauges and one circle there so that's kind of cool uh it is a four speed well five speed four with an overdrive manual transmission four wheel drive hopefully all that works out door panels are shot and i don't like these door panels anyways so if all goes well getting this thing going i'll probably switch to the a little bit more modern door panels that have the door pockets and stuff on them because the doors are all the same needs a mirror missing a headlight windshield's busted missing a tailgate missing a bumper the hitch is golden in there passenger door won't open from the outside rubber window trims all rotted away driver's seat shot glove box won't shut all four tires got plenty of tread and plenty of dry rot hubs busted off under the hood here we have the all too common ford 2.9 liter which again is the same engine that is in the ranger that i have out of the farm what's left of that ranger anyway when i got this thing home the only thing i tried to do to it was i threw a battery in it and i hit the key and it like cranked over a half a revolution and the starter was like grinding and stripping out of it so either the flywheel is gone or the bendix is gone on the starter either way we'll have to pull that thing off of there and have a look uh but in the half a revolution that it turned obviously it didn't start nor did i imagine it would i've never even checked any of the fluids in this truck i just kind of went and handed the guy money because it was so far there was no way i was coming back without it i don't see any antifreeze that's a great sign we're off to a good start here oh no there is antifreeze it's just down there always probably got three quarters and the radiator is full oh that's good nice and green too plug wires are an absolute disaster here and the oil looks good it's only about halfway full though so one of the bad body things i noticed after i got home was the firewall here i i checked all the usual spots for rust on this truck and didn't even look at the firewall i've never seen the firewalls rust on these before but this guy's got quite a bit of rust in it right where it meets the cowl up here right here at this hydro booster it's got a nice big hole i'm thinking maybe that rotted out because the cow is full of like pine needles and stuff so there's an access port right here we'll have to pop off and suck all that crap out of there looks like another one over here where the clutch reservoir is mounted so all in all i bought the ranger because i thought well it'd be a good daily beater uh you know if the 2 9 in it runs great if not i have another one and i also thought maybe just maybe this would be a cool project to throw a diesel in i've seen some volkswagen tdi engines put in these things and they're pretty cool i thought it would be pretty nice to have a little single cab short bed ranger with a diesel in it i thought that's going to be pretty unique and probably sip on fuel i know i got a buddy with a tdi and he gets like 55 mile of per gallon average that's in a car now i'm sure it wouldn't do quite as well on a four-wheel drive pickup but i think it would have enough power to do it especially there's a lot of mod you can do those tdi's to really get some power out of them so it's small enough to fit in here and wouldn't be too much work i think you can buy most of the parts off the shelf and not have to fab too much stuff up so that was uh my ultimate goal i was kind of just going to run the 2 9 until it blew up but the more i look at this thing and all the bodywork that's really wrong with it if i was gonna sink that kind of time and effort into a project i wouldn't want something that's uh maybe this rough to start but in my area it's pretty near impossible to find something that's in much better shape than this so we're gonna mess around get this thing running and if it runs good might slap a for sale sign on it i'd still like to do a tdi swap on one and we'll just have to see what happens maybe i'll go down south and bring one back that's spotless from you know somewhere where they don't get all the salt put on the roads every year so i guess without further ado let's get into this thing looks like he put a secondary fuel pump in it already and maybe that wasn't solving the issue that's why he gave up on it just finishing pulling these bolts out of the bed to hold the bed on we can get the bed yanked off and do a little bit better uh investigation underneath here to see what's going on with the fuel system that's another thing wrong they did a hack job taking these bolts out of here they didn't put the factory kind of bolts back in they used carriage bolts which i'll give them they look nicer maybe but quite a pain to get out this way the factory bolts you can just zip right out from up here on top ready no you're taking up all my strength oh god [Music] well the more i get into this thing the more irritated i'm getting with myself for buying it it's really they kind of just polished a turret and i kind of fell for it i guess you can see this thing does have some substantial rust here this cross member's got a chunk missing out of it it's rusted clear out of it you can see this is all heavily pitted and scaled and they just hit it with some sort of undercoating or some sort of paint metal gas tank uh it looks pretty clean so possibly it's been replaced not sure here's that rag we were seeing that's plugging the bung hole there we'll have to take a peek in there and see what we see now so i'm not sure if you guys can see in there but it's ugly it uh it's pretty ugly there's a good bit of rust on the inside of the tank and on the sending unit and i can see a fuel pump in there looks like the last owner replaced the fuel pump and he spliced the wires together with butt connectors didn't bother to heat shrink those even though they are the heat shrink type but admittingly i guess it doesn't matter there shouldn't really be any corrosion in the fuel tank but clearly there is once that's submerged with fuel however i don't think it will be as much of a problem i'm sure that corrosion is mostly there from that tank sitting empty a lot he told me that this truck sat for a long time before he got it and uh he was kind of having a hard time getting it going because of that i guess so if you've watched a lot of my previous videos you may have seen me attempting to start up my 91 ranger that had been sitting for seven or eight years and i couldn't get it going and after talking to a lot of people in the comments and a lot of research on my end well maybe not a lot of research but anyway after some digging on my end i found that it's common for those injectors to gum up and refuse to spray fuel after they've sat for a while so maybe the same issue here if we can hear both of our fuel pumps going then i'm going to say that that's probably something to do with our issue naturally a good starting place we're going to go ahead and toss a battery in it there's a bunch of questionable connections here i don't know what this is but it's a busted connector you could really just streamline this and put a regular old spade connector in there heat shrink it and be better than this busted piece of garbage but i don't even know what that goes to so we're going to hold off on that looks like there's a ground busted off here just a chassis ground so that's another something we've got a red a red wire running somewhere off of the ground so that's interesting i think this runs down to that uh in-frame fuel pump that they have rigged up in there i don't know i'm just going to put a battery in and connect everything the way they had it hopefully nothing catches on fire and we can do a little bit of probing around and see what we got there's stuff like right here there's all kind of corroded wires and exposed wires and stuff oh what a mess what a mess uh just so you guys can see what goes on when you hit the key i'm going to go ahead and try cranking it and if it does what it did last time it's just going to grind the starter contact oh yeah that's a great sound eh so the starters definitely got some issues we're gonna have to go ahead and yank the starter but uh before i even mess with that i don't have the starter here so taking it off isn't going to help me before we go ahead and mess with the starter though i'm going to trace down these wires see what this goes to and make sure our fuel pumps are both running so we're going to turn up the key on and see if we have our fuel pumps kick on i'm not hearing anything definitely no action in this tank everything's still perfectly still and this fuel pump has not kicked on either wow yeah nasty fuel oh man some lovely orange stuff that was once fuel in there that can't be good oh you guys that are avid watchers of the channel will know that i hate working on wiring uh and it's stuff like this that makes me hate it because this guy just did this in the most unprofessional way just wires run every which way all the same color no rhyme or reason to anything it's just a mess so this this really grinds my gears we're gonna get this fixed up it's gonna be at least a lot more right than it is right now so i pulled this fuel pump off the frame rail to bench test it um because there's a box in the truck for this thing i'm pretty sure this guy just put this on there might be not anything wrong with it i don't think it's getting power and that could be for multiple reasons here one of them i'm thinking might be the ignition switch because watch this i'm barely going to turn this key switch at all right now it should be in the on position all these lights should be on like that but i have to hold it there if i let go they go out so i don't think it's getting key on power to anywhere right now and that could be just the ignition module real simply we're going to go ahead and bench test this thing right now this is the positive post this is the negative post this red wire is hooked up to the ground so we should be able to just touch these posts just right look at that this pump works we're gonna go ahead and do a key on test like i said you know if i turn the key all the way i hear things clicking on and stuff but if i just put it in the on position i'm not hearing anything the lights on the dash don't light up or anything so what we'll do is use a test light and just connect to a ground somewhere and then we should be able to probe into our fuse box here and if we have power at anything then that means that we do have power at key on but that doesn't make sense so i'm pretty sure my theory is right this is just going to confirm it also here's another irritating broken thing about this truck the fuse panel the little mounting ears are busted off of it so that's another broken thing the key is just in the on position i'm not turning the ignition or anything we're going to probe up here into this spot where the fuse was so i got nothing oh did i get a flicker yeah look at that there we go actually i got a i wiggled the key just there to get the light here and when i had power here i heard the fuel pump in the tank kick on so that's definitely our problem we have a problem with our ignition switch let's see if we can't find that ignition module so it gets better i'm in here looking around and i just touched the harness right here there we go so we got a short here somewhere we're gonna have to find even easier after reviewing a quick second i can see it's just the connector here so we're gonna go ahead and get that fixed up so referencing back to that f700 crane truck video when i did the ignition switch there it came with a special metal clip to hold this switch in place as i guess that's a common problem i don't have a fancy one for this so i just bent this up out of a piece of coat hanger wire because it seems to be about the right tensile strength so hopefully it clips in here and holds that switch nice and tight for us yep look at that like factory let's see what we get a key on now look at that i can hear fuel pouring out perfect so i'm under here getting ready to pull the starter and the first thing i notice is there is some serious tom foolery going on with this starter uh the paint on it's pretty black and it's not all rusty so the starter looks pretty new i hope that means that the flywheel isn't stripped out oh man the upper bolt also has a bunch of washers piled up on it and stuff i i don't know what they did here but just pulled this out of the top bolt that's not right i'm hoping they don't have the bell housing all boogered up here but it's starting to look that way i don't know what's going on that's a flange nut this is this is a wheel stud nut oh man i'm laughing so i don't cry oh that's a good sign huh oh wowzers apparently the bell housing is just slapped full of rodent home oh fantastic prop well there's the flywheel teeth i don't see anything wrong with that well now i'm really at a loss here's the starter i just pulled out here's the one that i was gonna put in uh it's got the same tooth count on the bendix gears the one the bendix teeth on this starter that i removed look a heck of a lot better than the one i was gonna put in what's the difference here i don't i don't know something's something's askew the only thing under here that i see suspicious is that loose bell housing bolt there you can see the nuts not run down tight to the casting so i'm going to tighten that up and all i've got left to do is stick a starter back in it because i don't see any issues down here these are actually the same starters that i had on the crane truck same exact starters and i had the same problem with starters grinding and the way i fixed it was doing what i'm about to do and let's just shove it up against the pan as hard as i can while i'm tightening it down and that that made all the difference for me [Music] well that's about the best i'm gonna be able to do with it if that doesn't work i don't know what we're gonna do the engine's spinning over it's moment of truth i can start it from out here you guys ready that's not a great sign let's try a little bit of ether just a little bit [Music] it runs it sounds pretty mean too you can come up here too on your fuel rail there's a schrader valve right here you just gotta push it down and you should have uh fuel squared out yup if it blasts the hood you know you got enough pressure take three [Music] so [Music] [Music] so after some digging around online i read an article that said to pull the throttle position sensor off under these conditions and see if it starts so while you guys weren't looking i started probing around the fuel tank and you know the fuel didn't look too bad before but since we were cycling the pump so many times and everything it stirred up the tank a lot and it looked like crap and there really wasn't much in there so i decided better go ahead and suck that out not really good for the system so uh here's what that looked like whenever i sucked it out of there yeah that's some good looking fuel so tank's empty now i'm just gonna go ahead and put it into the vent hole here because you know why not you want to make sure you spill it all over the floor too that's pretty helpful when you're in a confined space okay so where are we at right now with our no start condition we know we've got spark because it runs on ether uh we know we got fuel pressure because i pushed the schrader valve on the rail and it blew it all over the hood we got good fuel pressure that leaves the fuel injection system so to test these old-school injectors the easiest thing to do and heck i'm not up on fuel injection it might even still be a current thing to do i got these little lights called nord lights so i went up picked up a little set of noid lights and we can uh plug these into the harness for the for the injectors and that will tell that'll tell us if we're getting our pulse to the injectors like we should be so i'm setting you guys up right here and i'm going to crank the truck over and that light should pulse contact [Music] okay so as you guys saw that thing was pulsing just fine so that should mean that our injectors are getting the right voltage and pulse width for the uh for the fire all right so the only thing really left to do here i'm just going to have to pull these injectors out and see what the heck's going on down here because i i'm out of ideas at this point it should work and it's not all right with the top half of the intake off i can go ahead and work on getting this injector rail off and then we'll start pulling a couple injectors looking at the tips and seeing if they're clogged brown liquid pouring out of here oh yeah there's some nasty oh man there's there's your problem right there i think they got some gummy i think i found our problem right here yep she's plugged pretty solid [Music] okay finally this thing is all back together i got injectors in there all holding pressure and hopefully this thing is ready to fire up fingers crossed contact oh [Music] it's running a little rough but i think the longer it runs the better it's going to get those injectors are probably still not the cleanest you know they need fuel runs through them to really clean them out internally [Music] what's happening so all right well that's enough we'll let the neighbors get a little bit of sleep tonight anyway i call that a success huh definitely still need some fine tuning it's idling pretty high but i mean there's vacuum leaks all over the place so i'll get a get some of that sorted out and it should definitely help our cause the longer this thing runs the better it's revving up the throttle response was terrible the moment it started but it's been improving i probably let it run about 10 minutes now go ahead and run some of the old fuel injector cleaner and stuff through there hopefully that helps out so anyways guys that's all i got for this video next video we are going to be throwing some tires on this pig fixing the clutch system and doing a little bit of fine tuning on the engine hopefully we can get it to smooth out run a little bit better and uh we'll go see what we can't tear up with this thing still not sure on the direction i'm going to go with this project as a whole if i'm going to keep it build it sell it off whatever so let me know down in the comments what you guys think i should do with it and i'll definitely take that into consideration also if you liked the video don't forget to do me a favor hit the thumbs up button and if you haven't already please hit that subscribe button and i uh i guess i'll see you guys in the next video thanks for watching [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Diesel Creek

Views: 357,191

Keywords: ford, ranger, truck, trucks, beater, 4x4, off road, recovery, salvage, revival, resurection, 2.9l, v6, engine, chevy, dodge, toyota, titan, tacoma, tundra, nissain, garagfe, shop, work, will it start, will it run, first start, in years, fixing, repair, restoration, restore, restoring, project, s10, s-10, shitbox

Id: K0C8irIq5Us

Length: 34min 9sec (2049 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021