Jim's 1982 300 Six Bronco Original Restoration

I'm having the same problem trying to find machine and fab shops near me. When I had my block prepped the first shop I called lectured me about the futility of rebuilding a 6cyl instead of simply accepting the job. The only other shop was in the process of shutting down and my fleet manager at work phoned in a favor to get mine done. Then, the nearest driveshaft shop quoted me a "go away" price and the second nearest was too far. I'm being picky because there are plenty of shops in the major cities within an hour (Oakland, Sacramento), but I refuse to go. Big cities stress me out. Last year on my trip through southern Utah, I desperately needed a part machined for my pop-up trailer and the closest shop from Moab with a lathe was in Grand Junction, CO. That was a rough time.

Oh and that's not my paint job on the tank, I just shelled out money for a new galvanized coat one.

I think enthusiasts are ageing out, along with refurbish/repair shops not having enough profitable work to keep the bills paid. (unless you specialize in vintage Ferrari's or something)

Face it, vehicles today are microprocessor controlled appliances with enough embedded nanny systems that can't function without a factory part being coded and calibrated it's a big challenge to work on them in your garage or an analog shop.
They're also built to be leased for 3-5 years when 'stuff' starts to fall apart.

I used to know where to get clutches and brake shoes refaced.  
When Ricky my auto radiator and A/C shop (2 blocks down from the alignment  shop) decides to hang it up they'll all be gone.
I live 40 miles from Manhattan. The affluenza and gentrification have driven all the machine shops, spring shops, fab/welding shops ect 45 minutes minimum upstate.
Generic engine builders don't seem to exist around here any more.

If I need to get a new tank when I drop mine to find the leak I'm going to get the silver powder coated one from Liland.
The mag chloride brine the DOT uses around here burns through zinc almost as bad as hydrochloric acid.
Hopefully it's just the rusty lock ring, since I installed a "stainless" sender unit along with a new tank back in 2015 when I had the bed off.

Ok. Enough crying. I've got to get back to work.

My generation and the younger kids just do bolt-on modifications. Performance cars these days just need an ECU tune and forced induction to get dramatically faster, and it can be done without any machine work or opening the engine. Only when you are a serious racer and you get fast enough to be blowing up engines or needing a roll cage would you ever need these types of services. Either that or they like to go low and slow. Either way it's all off-the-shelf parts. Even an old school design like a Jeep Wrangler, you break anything off-roading, get an overnight replacement on 4WheelParts and throw the old part in the trash. Everything is for sale online and it's cheap (and cheaply made) and it's disposable.

If you like the way you can go really fast, or get the ideal suspension, or go off-roading all with very little effort, it's a good time to be an enthusiast. If you like to work on your own vehicle or build it yourself, it's not. Nobody is going to be fully restoring a 2023 car decades from now, it just won't be possible.

I can send you a 2" lock ring and gaskets if you want 'em.

Ok, "enthusiast" is the wrong term.
There's plenty of performance off-road and street cars made today.
Today you can buy a Hyundai off the lot that would blow the doors off my old '85 GT notch.

But you don't have kids today doing all the longhand math when they can punch a few keys into Desktop Dyno.
They're not cutting valve reliefs in piston tops and polishing rod beams or porting heads with dad's die grinder out in the garage all night long..

The manufacturing of vehicles today is too optimized for a bunch of homebrewed easy gains.
I'm not talking about someone racing at the national level.
I'm talking about Wednesday night grudge matches at the abandoned airfield on the edge of town.

Thanks for your kind offer!  
My truck takes the 3-3/4"(?) ring and it's $3.72 from RA or $8 something from Amazon tomorrow...
I'm good with that.

I will tell you this... I had a 2016 Ford Fiesta ST, very fun little car. Turbo 1.6L 4-banger with a 6spd manual. The path to modification was select whatever bolt-on parts you want, buy the programmer, and email a tuning shop with your list of modifications and they will sell you an ECU map sent via email. Download into the car, bam. Absolutely no knowledge or dyno visit needed. On that car I didn't have much, just a 3" full exhaust from the turbo, short shifter with metal bushings, silicone motor and transmission mounts, oil catch can, summer tires, lightweight aftermarket wheels. Installation of add-ons was very easy to accomplish and results were instantly noticeable.

Speaking of decoding the modern car's electronics, getting Apple CarPlay to work was one of the hardest jobs on that car. I am not a computer/tech guy at all, I lost interest in my teenage years and now it just frustrates me. You can't just download an update on the car, the firmware is in the USB port, which you buy a new one and install. Then you download about 8GB of files from a hidden page on Ford's website and put them on a USB drive, load them into the car and wait an hour for the car to accept the updates. So few people had accomplished the task that there were no good guides at the time.

I think civilized street meetups are all but dead nowadays. The law comes down hard on groups of modified cars simply existing and the remaining unsanctioned events are pure chaos. There was a drag strip near Yakima, WA I used to frequent with my buddies that gave the street meetup vibe. We would back in our pickups on the second half of the track and deploy our living room furniture and drink beer not purchased at the concession stand.

Note I said "home brewed"...

Sure you can combine a bunch of bolt-ons and get a tune without spending    and hours on a Dyno.

Street takeovers are a real problem out here.
Law enforcement monitors social media but cities and towns still get overrun by these dangerous and menacing idiots.
It's no wonder there are violent confrontations.

Things are FAR different from 30-40 years ago when 20 kids with six packs meet up and face off in a remote location to see who gets the best holeshot or a dozen 50-70 year old guys with street rods in the Dairy Queen parking lot on Monday nights all summer long.

Welcome to the information age, I guess...

Oh yeah there's not much you can do to a new car to get any gains out of it without buying parts, except weight reduction and maybe cutting a hole in the airbox of certain cars... I was just saying that people aren't really even tweaking their own ECU tune, they just outsource it. It compliments the current cultural need for instant gratification. There's no need for knowledge on how the car works, leading to a lack of respect for the machine and the engineering that went into it. Kids these days don't understand what top end and bottom end power are, they don't think that performance is anything but a peak hp figure.

FWIW, I have one of those "little 4 cyl. cars" not as little as some as the basic car was a 6 passenger sedan that caught on and led to what was referred to as a Super K. It is a 1986 Chrysler Lebaron convertible, 2.2L Turbo II (turbocharged with an intercooler and running a Shelby designed 2 piece intake) at 14 psi the engine puts out roughly 200 HP and will leave one of the Fox Body Mustang GTs in it's dust. Younger son had the 1985 the engine was saved from after being totaled to 121 MPH near Washington DC and it was still accelerating at that speed.

As a result, T2K-CAR (VA license plate) MKII has rear disc brakes in place of the original 9" drums, front already had the bigger brakes from the factory.

As for tuning, Chryslers are interesting, between 1984 and 1990 there were 3 different computer systems, 1984-1987 a 2 piece with a logic module and a power module, essentially brain and brawn. Logic was the control and power contained the high current devices needed to run the coil, injectors and solenoid valves along with having a relay to power them and the fuel pump. 1988-1989 the two pieces were mated in a common case called a SMEC for Single Module Engine Controller. 1990 on it was revamped to an SBEC for Single Board Engine Controller. The LM-PM is the easiest, you remove the factory IC chip, replace it with a socket and burn the tune you want onto the correct chip and plug it in. The LM is inside the car, so is not sealed. On the SMEC and SBEC, the procedure is similar, but you have to open the case, cut the potting away and remove the factory chip, install a socket then burn your tune onto a chip and plug it in. There was one man who found that the SBEC motherboard had the capability of taking a 32 pin socket and he developed a "flash module" allowing you to quickly change a tune.

Ford EECs up through the EEC-IV are not capable of being reflashed, they can have a device or internal board plugged in to the J2 port (generally a rubber plug in the back of the case is removed for access. The EEC-V ones can be reflashed with the proper hardware and software (which I have) by using a "token" to break the "lock" Ford has on them.

I have visited your project thread a few times. Beforehand I never knew they made a turbo LeBaron, thought there was only the Omni and Charger at first. Once you get done, your car would be a hit at a Radwood show. The blocky cars from the 80s are really cool right now, specially if they got a turbocharger. Probably the biggest difference between your turbo 4 and the one I had, the Fiesta's turbo was an itty bitty Borg Warner KP39 that spooled up instantly and takeoff was like a gut punch from the abundant low-end torque, but it had no legs after 4000rpm. 110 mph was the ceiling before acceleration really started to fall off. The whole car felt like Ford knew what they were doing but spent very little time developing it.

The programmer I used was called an Accessport. Plugs into the OBDII port and has a GUI that can be used for gauges. It was all software. I am young but still old enough to remember when guys would say their vehicle is "chipped". Recently helped a friend put a chip in his 7.3 Powerstroke Super Duty. There is a shop in Florida that builds tuned older EECs, if I go with a '96 300 swap that might be cool to run when I'm not due for an emissions test...


And here's the driveshafts. I was hoping they would've included more hardware than a few bolts but oh well. I also requested sealed u joints but I guess they don't do those?

Chrysler put turbos on the 2.2L engines because they were getting killed in the market by Ford and GM who both had V6s in the K-car size range. Chevy had a 2.8L V6 optional in the Citation, Ford had a 4 cyl engine for the Taurus but it was only in fleet sales, most had a 3.0L V6. Until Chrysler got the Mitsubishi 3.0L OHC V6, their "big engine" was the 2.6L Mitsubishi 4 cyl, which was a mediocre performer with poor fuel economy.

Let's step back to 1964, Lee Iacocca was head of Ford Division and they had released a sensation in April, the Mustang. Dropping the Fairlane's HiPo 289 in the Mustang helped, but it needed to be a race winner if it was to really sell. In 1962 a Texas chicken farmer and former race car driver named Carol Shelby had an idea for a V8 powered sports car, Chevrolet turned him down on buying their engines, so he called Ford, Lee Lacocca  thought he had a good idea and since the Ford 221/260 were a bit lighter than the Chevy it sounded good to Shelby. He was almost as much of a con artist as Smokey Yunick, He built a prototype after convincing AC cars he had an engine (he didn't at that time) and Ford that he had the cars (also not true at that time). He took it to car shows (I saw it in Norfolk VA) and painted it between shows so it looked like there were several cars. Iacocca called Shelby and asked if he thought he could make the Mustang into a race car to compete with the Corvettes, he did just that.

Now, Ford had canned Iacocca because he was getting too powerful and wasn't part of the family, he landed at Chrysler charged with saving them. When Ford fired him, all the projects he was working on were scrapped, one of which was a smaller FWD 6 passenger car, this was the basis for the K-car. Engines, Chrysler had just introduced a new 2.2L 4 cyl which was a decent running engine particularly in the Omni and Horizon. Iacocca wanted to add some spice to the lineup and called Shelby, first out was the Omni GLH for "goes like hell", a high compression 2.2L that put out 110HP carbureted, Chrysler was already building some turbocharged 2.2L engines that put out 142HP. Shelby put more boost, a better intake and an intercooler and upped it to 175HP. These were called Turbo II and had a forged crank, larger rods and a two piece intake. Dropped in an Omni, it became the GLHS Shelby and Chrysler's engineers came up with the turbo III, a DOHC 2.2L and the turbo IV a variable nozzle turbo and turbocharged the 2.5L that replaced the Mitsubishi 2.6L starting in 1986.

Is it weird I've seen more real-deal Shelby Cobras and GT-350s than turbo Mopars? Carroll Shelby also invented the chili cookoff competition.


I initially did up some aluminum fuel lines but after some reading online about corrosion I ripped them out and went stainless. Fuel tank is in for good. Just gotta bolt up the filler neck.




Eventually I'll get good at bending this stuff.

They look good!  I've heard stainless is really hard to bend so that makes them look even better.

I bought Totally Stainless lines for Dad's truck and had to rebend every single one of them to get them to fit.  So I know a teeny bit about bending the stuff.  But not flaring, which has to be a bear!

It is insanely hard to bend that 3/8" tubing without a high-leverage bender. I ended up hose clamping my bender to a pipe that I drove into the dirt outside. I went with compression fittings because flaring stainless seems like it can go horribly wrong and I didn't wanna buy another tool. The compression fittings I use at work can do several thousand psi but they have stainless ferrules and these only have brass, but the tubing here is much thinner walled and the reviews on the parts are all good.

Well I basically got my transmission back together except I had to order a small parts kit because the lock rings for the main shaft bearings only last so many times of being removed and installed. The shifter doesn't feel "springy" anymore in the neutral position so there's that... I didn't use a hydraulic press to assemble the main shaft this time so we shall see if the dead blow hammer and block of wood was good enuff.

Steering column is fully rebuilt. Just need to check all the switch functions


I don't remember where this part goes...


Gasket for the steering column mount fits good. Still waiting for parts to make the column gasket/damper


If there is a decent way to replace the u-joint on the lower steering shaft I think I will be rebuilding it because it's too ugly to put back in like this.


Not a fan of this solution for the parking brake, the cable kit came with a piece of plastic tubing around the cable jacket and I had a grommet that fits but it's an oval hole and it's already coming out. The original grommet is very long to help with sealing but unfortunately it was rotted to pieces and there are no replacements.


I cannot for the life of me find a steel hole plug for the front floorboard. All the parts I find are for Mustangs or they just "fit Ford". Might have to make a run to the j-yard.

Okay looks I'm getting a Borgeson steering shaft. Right after my last post I tried taking it apart and just ended up dissecting it with a cutoff wheel to see how it ticks

JimJam300 wrote

Okay looks I'm getting a Borgeson steering shaft. Right after my last post I tried taking it apart and just ended up dissecting it with a cutoff wheel to see how it ticks

From what I seen posted thatis the way to go.
Sorry I cant help on the other things.
Dave ----

Finally finished with the body mounts. It took a lot of modifications so I hope I will like the polyurethane.

Also made some gaskets for the fresh air plenum covers. With vents and without. Not sure what I'm going to end up installing. I can make some more if anyone is interested in having some.

Those are nice gaskets!  I made mine out of weatherstrip tape, but yours look much better.  

JimJam300 wrote

If there is a decent way to replace the u-joint on the lower steering shaft I think I will be rebuilding it because it's too ugly to put back in like this.

I just replied in another thread that id adapted a later ('09-'14) lower shaft.
It does away with the rag joint and the sloppy plastic bushing.

https://forum.garysgaragemahal.com/Restore-of-my-1986-Bronco-XLT-tp137348p141979.html


Id be interested to see if anything turns up for the cab bolt cover plates.
Since I had to replace the floor anyway, I ended up making them round and getting some thick plastic bulkhead block-offs.
At least they'll never rust???

Edit to ask:  did you change your username to match your YouTube channel?

Jim/ArdWrknTrk - If you have several pictures of your work to make that shaft, or links to them, I'd love to put together a how-to.  I've searched for your post(s) several times but it would be a lot easier to find it it was on the Documentation part of the site.