Rob's Aussie Bronco 1986 5.0 EFI

G'day guys.

As this is going to be a repair, rejuvenate and renovation of my 86 Aussie Bronco, it seemed like a good idea to start a specific thread that I can add to as repairs and changes are made to the old girl.

Here's the old girl in all her glory a week ago when I first got her home to the farm.





This weekend I started working on the Smog delete, primarily because the smog pump had failed and PO had put a shorter belt to drive the alternator and just left the old pump sitting there. Also a lot of messy wiring, broken clips and all sorts that needed attending to.

So that was Friday and Saturday, but this morning I came out to the workshop all ready to fit my newly modified alternator bracket, and found water in a valley of the timing case cover where I had wiped it all up yesterday. On further inspection there is a multi port water connection into the manifold basically behind the throttle bodies and I could see that the water had been leaking from there for a long long time, and had now gotten worse.

So there went the day! Pulling things off to finally get to the water connection, only to find that the 3/8" top outlet was a steel pipe welded in that actually barely existed. I got the hoses off finally and what I found was far from pretty.



Looking at the fitting, I could remove the left side large elbow and the water temp sender but the damaged upper wouldn't clear the dizzy and I sure wasn't too keen to remove that!

I ended up cutting the remainder of the upper steel tube away and then I could spin the fitting with a large socket on the head and remove it carefully from the manifold.



Once removed I cleaned it up with the wire on the bench grinder and then popped it into the sandblaster to ensure that the inside and all the threads were really clean. Then rummage through some old plumbing fittings and I located a threaded step sleeve in galvanized steel that looked promising to work with.



I drilled out the remnants of the rusted upper tube, and enlarged it to 16mm. Then into the lathe with the old gal fitting and I spun it into a stepped shoulder with the right size shank to press into the 16mm hole. Then a bit of silver soldering with the oxy torch and it looked like a great start. I made the head a little larger than stock as I needed the extra thread for the new barbed 3/8" fitting.



I had some two pack silver caliper paint left over from a previous job, and it goes as hard as stale Kangaroo poo so I sprayed it with that and two hours later it was ready to fit. Looks nice, and seems to work even better. Tick that box for another few years I think.

To get rid of the smog pump and still mount the alternator I had to reuse the smog pump bracket. No Summit racing or similar speed shops around here to buy an alternator bracket so I had to make do.

I cut the big bracket off about 1/2" after the alternator mounting point then dressed the cut offs nice and round with a flap wheel on the angle grinder.

Then into the sandblaster to get it all clean before painting with two pack silver caliper paint.

Looks okay until I can find a cleaner look down the road, but at least it serves the purpose and looks tidy.

Nice work!

Yes, that is excellent work.