Garage Projects

The Lone Ranger – Misc Maintenance

I’ve been fighting a bit of an overheating problem on the Ranger on the trail as well as some highway conditions (pulling long hills for example). I’ve also known that I needed to do something about my leaking intake and valve covers. Over Memorial Day I tackled both issues.

The first part of the maintenance was easy (though time consuming) and well documented on the interwebz for the lower intake manifold gasket replacement.

You take this:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

Pull all the crap off and you get this:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

Assembly is the reverse of removal I took the time to swap out my rusted though valve covers with some less rusted through ones while I was at it. The big surprise here was that this truck was running as well as it was with the lower gasket in the condition it was in. With all the crap cleaned out of the runner (one runner was blocked about 35%), I now have something called ‘low end torque’. It makes it much more pleasant to drive now though I still need to throw some gears at it in the near future.

While things were tore apart, I swapped out my fan clutch for another one which solved my slow speed cooling issue, though the truck ran warmer than I’d like it too. So I did what I thought was going to be a bolt in swap by putting in a 2 row radiator from a 1994 Explorer with the ‘heavy duty cooling’.

Edit: Info added:
Application:
1994 Ford Explorer
Auto Tranny with A/C
“Maximum” cooling option

Murray 432217 (from O’Reilly Auto Parts)
UPC: 40876422179

Part of this swap was pretty straight forward. The new radiator is on the Right, the old one on the left (note: you need a different lower radiator hose if you’re running a manual). The inside of the radiator didn’t look bad IMO, but it did have some build up in there:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

The problem is here, the new radiator in addition to being thicker, also stands off from the body further than the old one:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

Which puts it closer (but not too close) to the fan. This is good as it seems to make the fan clutch lock up sooner:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

As a quick side note, you can’t really fit a Taurus fan in between the motor and the radiator with the Explorer radiator in the Ranger. The fan is hitting the Taurus fan is hitting the water pump in this photo:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

In the end, I wound up hacking on the stock 4.0 fan shroud quite a bit to make it work. I don’t think that even the Explorer fan shroud would work in this application, so you’re pretty much left to make up your own fan shroud, or hack up your original 4.0 shroud:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

In the end it worked out:
Sara L.: Build and Misc &emdash;

This took care of the majority of my ‘warm running’ problem. By rebuilding the fan shroud to cover the parts I hacked off, and replacing some of the foam in between the radiator and body, the truck ran where it was supposed to temperature wise.

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