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Owns A Torsen
Joined: Mon Sep 18th, 2017
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Since this is the only V8 ranger specific forum on the internet (it really is) I am choosing to vent here. The views expressed are those of my own and no animals will be harmed during this post.
My swap is killing me. I wish someone would just tell me it really can't be done and I would cut my losses now.
I am starting with a short cab short bed 2000 ranger with coil springs originally with a 2.5 4 cylinder and an automatic. WHY? Because I don't like the looks of an extended cab, I don't like the looks of a 7 foot bed or step sides (which is a short bed but I don't care I don't like the look). I like amazon green. I found a short cab short bed in amazon green, it just happened to be a 2000 with a 2.5 4 cylinder and an automatic.
So finally after over 20 years I had what I thought was a beginning of a V8 powered ranger I had wanted to do one for that long.
SO I looked at an article I found on another general ranger forum that said an explorer from a 96 through 2001 was a "plug and play" swap in a 98 to 2000 ranger.
COOL I'll go the easy route.
Turns out the article was for a 4WD (after all who would ever want a 2WD) and just about everything I bought was either wrong or not needed.
So I searched even more and found an article that said for a coil spring ranger I needed these mounting plates and to use 4.0 V6 mounts.
In searching for the plates I found the forum the guy was on is shut down but I did find blueprints for the plates on another site. Yay. Even clearly had marked the ford number for the motor mounts I needed YAY again.
YL5Z-6038-CA for drivers side and YL5Z-6038-CB for passenger side. Clear enough eh? Have no idea what I'm going to do with the 5.0 explorer mounts I bought already (because of the plug and play article) and figured out quickly they are the wrong angle. Oh well.
I searched on my dear e-bay, found countless CB's but not any CA-s with a picture that looked like the mount. The CB had a cross reference to anchor, but on their site no CA.
SO I contacted Anchor. "We have a direct replacement for the CB but never made one for the CA." ? It's the same vehicle! Oh well got one on the way off to find a CA.
I bought a CB from Anchor, it comes in and looks like the picture and fit the passenger side, stud, pin and all! Yay! So I bring it in my office and casually set it beside the original 2.5 mount I had torched a shock stud off destroying the shock and had to maul a sway bar link to get the mount removed. IT WAS THE SAME MOUNT. Either Anchor sent me the wrong one or the passenger side 4.0 explorer mount is identical to the ranger 2.5 passenger side mount.
Extensive e-bay searching turns up a guy who had a YL5Z-6038-CA in a box. I buy it. The box is an official ford box with the official ford number YL5Z-6038-CA. I get it, it turns out being the 5.0 mount for the explorer. ? Another one. This makes 3 new explorer mounts I have collected now and can't use one of them.
So I paid big bucks and bought one from an authorized ford dealer on e-bay. Or thats what they claimed, all the dealer sites I checked said obsolete and no more stock. I had it sent to me at 3 times the price of any other I had bought so far.It comes in an official ford box with YL5Z-6038-CA on the outside. I open the box, and though the top looked correct the stud to pin distance is different from the old driver side ranger mount. As a matter of fact it fit the passenger side... so I compared it to the Anchor... IDENTICAL. By this time I'm having blood pressure spikes and wondering why I started this project at all.
Today I put the passenger side mount in, wallowed out the pin hole and put the driver side mount in thinking this must be "what they meant" in the swap sheet I have for the plates I bought.
I get to looking at the plates clearly marked passenger side and drivers side. The passenger side has a raised section on it that connects to the motor block and the passenger side is just a flat plate.Curious, I put a straight edge on the mounts now attached to the frame. They were dead in line with each other. Then why was one plate with a raised portion making it just shy of a half inch higher than the other? I figured the motor must be offset in mount height so I measured with a depth caliper from the bottom where the oil pan bolts on to the holes the plates attach to and they are within like .020" of each other, well within machining error for a casting that large.
SO I put a half inch of washers under the drivers plate to bring it level with the other. The nut won't thread on the mount. So I put 1/4 on and was going to put 1/4 between the block and the plate amounting to the same half inch.
THEN I noticed something else, the slotted holes in the plates didn't seem to make sense since the driver mount is way toward the rear of the truck than the passenger mount. Looked like wrong direction. I couldn't have them on wrong the driver side plate has a notch to avoid the steering knuckle and the passenger side blueprint was a weldment and the way it was made it could only go one way unless the print I have is wrong.
SO we dropped the motor in and sure enough the driver side seems to line up right where it should and the passenger side would need to be slotted about 2 inches more to keep the motor from being at an angle.
That is the mount rant, 2 more things happened today where a melling high flow oil pump I bought was about .300" too tall to fit under my oil pan AND a brand new double roller timing chain and gear set that I paid extra for because it was a true double roller had the large chamfer on the wrong side of the crank gear making it ride up on the radius between the gear mount diameter and the journal diameter. I cut the right chamfer on the back instead of on the front where it was, put it on and the chain is looser than the old one I took off with 160,000 miles.
Not a good day.
My summary question is, does anyone know someone who has a 98 thru 2000 ranger, 2WD, RCSB, coil springs, originally with a 2.5 that has successfully planted a 5.0 out of an explorer in? I have thrown all the instructions away and are in auto-fab mode.
Thanks LOL.
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00 XLT 4WD RCSB 3.GO! Jalapeño
01 XLT 2WD RC Steppie 3.0 auto Silver
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