Off-Road Ranger I
Project's still moving along, although a little slower now that it's on the road... can be difficult to convince myself to keep it in the shop long enough to pick away at the still very long "to do list" 
When I first got it rolling on the road the only lighting I worried about was brake lights, so 1st order of business getting it daily driving worthy was building a new chassis harness for ALL the lights:
I scribbled up so many revisions of a wiring plan before I settled on a version I liked, and of course triple checking the math on all the loads + designing it to be easy to work on:
Building the actual harness was a treat since I chose to use relatively fancy motorsports grade components (raychem, deutsch, etc) and color coded it in a nice simple way compared to stock:
All the lumens have returned!
Another job on the list was ridding myself of the fumes and soot from the hood exit exhaust. I mean, it was fun while it lasted, just look at these flames!
Still haven't pulled the trigger on a TIG welder, so building a proper full length & muffled stainless exhaust will wait, and for now I just took a dive into my scrap pile:
Exhaust routing wasn't too bad despite the huge pipe diameter, but when it comes time for air-conditioning and compound turbo's this side will get crowded:
Just about as tucked up as I could manage, and hopefully when I build rock-sliders I will have already sorted a "real" exhaust for it to exit out back instead:
Right now I'm brainstorming a plan for the ebrake / handbrake / parking brake. A long while back I fit a CRX rotor in the driveline that was the right diameter + thickness I needed to match a Wilwood mechanical caliper there on the transfer-case output (where the old drum brake was) using a custom billet mounting bracket that I'll whip up on my mill, and then I'll link it to the stock brake handle inside with a cable:
Next on my list is sealing up the modified transmission tunnel & refitting a lot of the interior pieces over it, then fitting a proper Donaldson air cleaner + custom snorkel to replace the floppy K&N cone that's there now, then adding radiator cooling fans (yep... still running a passive cooling system).
When I first got it rolling on the road the only lighting I worried about was brake lights, so 1st order of business getting it daily driving worthy was building a new chassis harness for ALL the lights:
I scribbled up so many revisions of a wiring plan before I settled on a version I liked, and of course triple checking the math on all the loads + designing it to be easy to work on:
Building the actual harness was a treat since I chose to use relatively fancy motorsports grade components (raychem, deutsch, etc) and color coded it in a nice simple way compared to stock:
All the lumens have returned!
Another job on the list was ridding myself of the fumes and soot from the hood exit exhaust. I mean, it was fun while it lasted, just look at these flames!
Still haven't pulled the trigger on a TIG welder, so building a proper full length & muffled stainless exhaust will wait, and for now I just took a dive into my scrap pile:
Exhaust routing wasn't too bad despite the huge pipe diameter, but when it comes time for air-conditioning and compound turbo's this side will get crowded:
Just about as tucked up as I could manage, and hopefully when I build rock-sliders I will have already sorted a "real" exhaust for it to exit out back instead:
Right now I'm brainstorming a plan for the ebrake / handbrake / parking brake. A long while back I fit a CRX rotor in the driveline that was the right diameter + thickness I needed to match a Wilwood mechanical caliper there on the transfer-case output (where the old drum brake was) using a custom billet mounting bracket that I'll whip up on my mill, and then I'll link it to the stock brake handle inside with a cable:
Next on my list is sealing up the modified transmission tunnel & refitting a lot of the interior pieces over it, then fitting a proper Donaldson air cleaner + custom snorkel to replace the floppy K&N cone that's there now, then adding radiator cooling fans (yep... still running a passive cooling system).
