After moving in together with my then-girlfriend, we decided that we didn’t need two car payments, and that I’d get rid of my 2005 Civic. Despite it being a dead-reliable and economical car, it was stick-shift, which she couldn’t drive, and not much fun to drive, unlike her 2005 Mazda 3. I did use the Coronet for the summer, but for the winter I wanted a truck. And my brother had just blown up the transmission in his.
An ’86 Ranger XLT, with a 2.9, 4-speed automatic, and bright red interior. He had bought it from a student here at the Coast Guard College, who had brought it with him from somewhere out West. Thus, the body and frame were in quite good condition. It had a pile of kilometers on it, but aside from the transmission, it worked well.
I think it had rolled 287,000 KM.
I located a replacement three-speed automatic and manual transfer case for it, and swapped some parts for it. A set of driveshafts were made, and we were off to the races. The one less gear in the transmission made the truck just awful on fuel. On the highway it worked out to something like 13 MPG. Anyhow, without a car payment, it wasn’t much of an issue.
On a weekend road trip mid-winter.
Despite its propensity for eating fuel, it proved reliable. We did a few winter trips in it, and it was quite good in the snow. It wasn’t super roomy, but you could stick stuff behind the seat easily enough. For running back and forth to work, it suited the bill. The 2.9 always started up well, and wasn’t scared to rev. Ford’s Cologne V6’s seemed to have a bit of a mixed reputation, but this one was one of the good ones.
My wife-to-be and I also had a fledgling interest in camping. I’d done some research, and decided that a small fibreglass trailer would be the best option for us. Small, easy to tow, weather-tight. We found a Trillium Jubilee for a reasonable price, and liking what we saw, we bought it. Then it came time to tow it home. The poor little Ranger was too underpowered to haul the camper any distance. I had to keep my foot heavily on the throttle to keep up with the traffic, and upon getting home, the truck smelled of hot oil and grease. It wouldn’t last long towing. It wasn’t so much that the trailer was heavy (it wasn’t) but there was so much flat frontal area on the front of the camper, that the faster I tried to go, the heavier the load was on the truck. After hooking it to the Scout, it hauled it with ease with its 304 V8.
The body was starting to look tired on the truck and it was due for its MVI, so I did some rudimentary body work on it, and sprayed it with the paint I could buy at cost from work, black with a yellow bottom. It turned out OK. Unfortunately I hadn’t replaced the tires yet…While driving down to my house from my father’s next door, I went to stop on the slick grass and ended up sliding into the corner of the house.
Ouch.
You can see how bald the tires were in the picture above. The house fared out fine, thankfully – I’d caught it on the corner. I was pretty much disgusted with myself, and the truck. I gave the truck back to my brother, and father – they fixed it up and sold it. I think it ended up as a plow truck. Now I was on the hunt for a cheap winter beater. More on that next week.
Nice truck! Like the Cat paint scheme.
Hi. My name is PRNDL and I also caused a car vs house incident. Late 70s, stupid teenager working on the running engine in my ‘62 Pontiac Bonneville. The car slipped into gear, jumped the makeshift wheel chock, left the garage with me trying to reach in to steer and/or get the car into neutral. It went down a small embankment, crossed the neighbor’s front yard and bumped into her front door jamb.
She took it pretty well, considering the circumstances. Our small town cop was more amused than anything. Since there was no “driver“ per se, there was no ticket. Had to pay the neighbor 2 or 3 hundred dollars to fix her house. The Pontiac was pretty much unscathed.
Hey PRNDL, Your name is a more modern version of what that 62 Bonneville had in its gear selector pattern. If I recall, the 62 would have looked something like this: P-N-D2-D1-L-R, or similar.
My 57 Olds was P-N-D-S-L-R. A few years later they standardized to your name.
“… the car slipped into gear, jumped the makeshift wheel chock, left the garage with me trying to reach in to steer and/or get the car into neutral…”.
When I worked on cars in the old days, this was a real possible nightmare. On GM V8s one could adjust the points with an insulated allen wrench through a little trap door in the distributor. With head under the hood and the engine running, it would not be hard for that idling 389 4-barrel to hop a wheel block if that shiny chrome lever slipped into D2, D1, L, or R.
All in all, I’m glad no one was hurt when that truck broke free.
Ouch!
It’s been a while since I was downsized out of the dealership, but I still bleed Cat yellow.
As the former owner of a Ranger (albeit one with a 4 cylinder engine and manual transmission), I do agree they are quite reliable. My father owned a Ranger very similar to yours (with the automatic transmission still a 4 speed) but never mentioned the gas mileage. I think on very long trips he managed nearly 20 mpg.
Can’t say I ever had a run-in with a building, though my family got a few laughs out of my sister’s running into the side of our house on her return from successfully passing her first driving test.
As described in my recent COAL, I too had an ‘86 Ranger, SuperCab, 2.9 with the 4 speed automatic and manual transfer case. Bought new, had it for 9 years … good truck. Mine would get 17-20 US mpg. About the same as my 2016 Tacoma. I’m curious, why did you replace the 4 speed with a 3 speed?
IIRC the 4 speed auto with manual hubs is somewhat rare. The later models with the automatic hubs changed something in the trans that made switching to manual hubs a pain. I had a Ranger with a 3 speed auto and wanted a 4 speed auto.
I had a 90 with the EFI 2.9 and 5sp manual trans and it was rare to get under 20 mpg in daily driving. It would get in the mid to high teens when towing a small single axle travel trailer and maybe 25 mpg on long freeway trips. The majority of that was done with a canopy on it.
A friend had scrapped an ’85 and gave me the transmission. IIRC, 4 speeds were a rare commodity as they were in demand. It ended up being more work than it was worth.
Strong house, too.
I had a ‘92 Ranger 2.3 4cyl, the one with two plugs per cylinder and a 5-speed manual. It would get about 20mpg and my VW Bus kept up with it to about 45 mph (I’m not joking) but it was pretty robust and dead reliable. I have to give it that. I abused that poor truck and the clutch slave cylinder was the only problem it ever gave me.
“The poor little Ranger was too underpowered to haul the camper any distance.” The 4.0L Cologne (still 4 yrs away) would make mince-meat out of that job. That being said, frontal area does indeed take a toll on how much you can actually haul. You’re likely going to be jealous of me, but one day I thought about both of my trailers & wondered “what if I tried pulling them AT THE SAME TIME?” The Nissan trailer just happened to still have its rear bumper in addition to a 2000-lb. capacity hitch ball AND a 4-flat wiring harness; why not go try them out? I did just that on September 13th. How did it go? Well, actually not too bad for having the 2.3L Duratec I4: certainly not fast or for a terribly long distance (had my hazard flashers on; just around the block), but otherwise never struggled one bit pulling the entire load thanks to a 5-speed automatic transmission & 4.10 rear gearing. Amazingly all the lights on both trailers worked too, certainly helped by the fact that the Wells Cargo’s lights are LEDs meaning less total draw from the Ranger’s electrical system. Even more amazing was that when I filled back up with gas after everything was put up the truck still averaged over 26 mpg–can’t argue with that! Not going to make a habit of this, though, for 2 key reasons: 1) it’s probably not even highway legal in SC & 2) you can forget about trying to back up! I unhitched the trailers after this photo was taken. I could’ve gotten better views if it weren’t for our trees…
There are midwestern states where that would be a legal configuration. My wife’s family is from North Dakota and when we used to go back there is was not an uncommon sight to see a truck towing a travel trailer and boat or travel trailer and a trailer with motorcycles/ATVs. Haven’t been back in more than a decade so people were doing that with yesterday’s “low powered” trucks.
I like the Ranger trucks, but in your situation, an old F-150 with the 300 six (4.9 litre here in Canada) would have pulled that trailer like it wasn’t there with the same (or better) gas mileage. Also, it sounds like you should have stuck with the manual. I used to have a Nissan Hardbody with the 2.4 litre and a 5-speed, and I wouldn’t even consider swapping it for an automatic.
Enjoyable read. 13mpg would hurt, car payment or no car payment, and that little ranger has to be one of the least satisfying ways of burning that much fuel.
“I was pretty much disgusted with myself, and the truck. I gave the truck back to my brother…”
This is an amusing statement when paired with the picture. I can only imagine stepping out after the impact, looking at the notched front end and saying “Well, good. I can get rid of this thing now”