It's alive!
Haven't been posting updates every day, but have been steadily doing a little along int he afternoons for the last three weeks and weekends. Saturday was spentgetting most of the acessory drive reassembled and the upper intake in place. Sunday we fought with getting the cat pipes back in with hopes of getting started on a temporary or good enough exhaust, that was a bust. Cat pipes went in, but quickly determined that the rest was best left to professionals with a lift and a tubing bender. Instead got the rest of the cooling system installed.
Monday we buttoned up a lot of the little things around the engine. Then after getting home I finished making my jumper harness between the Ranger body harness and Explorer start/charge harness. That connector is reversed between the Explorer and Ranger, so both sides had female connectors, but pinout is exactly the same for what maters. Didn't really want to cut into either major harness to swap ends. I stopped by the new pick-n-pull and grabbed two male conectors from wrecked Rangers, spliced them together, and split out the wires for the AC prerssure switch up near the core support.
Today we added fluids, swapped throttle cable, then trouble shot some bad connections. Turns out I never tightened the MEGA fuse nuts, kind of hard for anything to work when there's no connection.
After that was figured out we spun the engin over for a while to prime the oil system. Installed plugs and wires. Need to tidy that up, but it'll do for now. Then had to wait for a Forscan license, just used the free 2 month for this, but will probably buy year when it runs out. If I'd known it was going to take 30 minutes to get the trial key I'd have just bought it. Plugged in the laptop, ran the PATS service to initialize the module. Still didn't want to start, but a few times it acted like it wanted to. Started playing with the throttle while cranking and evenmtually it fired for the first time with the V8. Started it two more times but had to hold the throttle open for both and was running a little rough for all three. Thought that's good enough for today!
Bit later I went out and started it again because I wanted to know if my AC worked (it seems to) and this time I turned the key and it fired right up and ran smooth IMO
Tomorrow I'll be blind and have to avoid dusty environments for 24 hours, so might be Thursday before much more gets done, unless dad feels like messing with it. He's been helping a little and I think it has been good for him after the chemo, as long as he doesn't over do it. Got to replace Pass FWD O2 sensor, wrong one (year and connector) installed and the right one stripped the threads trying to remove from old pipe. Then we can install tires, get it off stands, add coolant (or water), finish filling transmission, and power steering fluid. Hoping tyhat possibly Friday I can get it to an exhaust shop and maybe have it back at the beginning of next week.
I think I'm almost ready for that V8 swap banner! Still going to wait until I've actually driven it down the road, or at least moved under its own power.