Hey guys, it's been quite a while since I've gotten on here. Between finals week at school, moving twice in a week with a vacation out of state in between, and starting my first work term of my co-op I haven't had a whole lot of time lately. I have big news though! Last weekend I was able to go home and work on the truck a bit, and for the first time since late fall 2016, my truck ran! For about 2 seconds anyway... more on that later.
I did end up taking the entire fuel system from the Explorer and transplanting it in to the Ranger. The Explorer is 2-door, and the Ranger is a supercab, so there was a difference in wheelbases. The Ranger tank has all the connections at the front, and the Explorer has all of them at the back. So the Explorer lines end up right at the same spot as the old Ranger one did, however they aren't long enough to connect to the Explorer tank if it's sitting where it wants to be because of the connections being at the back.
I was already planning on just doing something temporary for testing anyway, so this was no big deal. I just slid the tank way forward so it would reach the lines and turned it about 90 degrees so it wouldn't hit one of the frame cross-members. However, the wiring for tank is proving to be a bigger issue. They both use the same style connector. However, when I went to actually connect them, I realized they were keyed differently, and the wiring is slightly different. The Ex has a 7 pin connector, while the Ranger is 8. My guess is the Ex grounds something through the tank body due to its steel construction while the plastic Ranger tank doesn't allow that so I it needs an extra wire for a ground.
So just for testing purposes, I had my girlfriend crank it while I sprayed starter fluid in the intake. Much to my surprise, it fired up without any kind of troubleshooting or headaches. So I'm pretty confident in the rest of the wiring other than the tank, which is awesome because I originally expected the wiring to be the hardest part. I did have to extend the starter wiring, but luckily enough the previous owner left some 4 gauge subwoofer wiring in the Explorer that worked just perfectly in conjunction with a giant butt connector from O'Reilly's.
Before I left to go back to my housing for work, I took a bunch of pictures of the fuel tank connectors to study. I have spent a few nights looking over wiring diagrams and so far I have not been having a whole lot of luck. The coloring is not the same on both, so I know I can't just connect them that easily. What I have determined so far is that pink/black on both is power to fuel pump, and black is fuel pump to ground. Then there are 2 more wires coming out of the fuel pump area of the Explorer tank - a yellow/white and a yellow/black. I assume those are for the fuel level sender, but I don't see those on my diagram. I also don't know how those correspond to the Ranger harness because the colors don't match. Finally, the other 3 wires go into a smaller connector on the opposite side of the tank. I'm guessing it's emissions related, but again I didn't see it on my diagram, and I also didn't think to take a picture of that, I though a picture of the big connectors would be enough to just look at the wire colors and find them on a diagram. So I can't Google a part number until next time I'm there in person again to actually look at it.
If anyone knows any more information that would be great. Either way thanks to everyone on here who has helped me either directly through this thread or indirectly through the wealth of knowledge in the tech library and all the other swap threads. I couldn't have done this without TRS.