Betsy the B2300- Bluej's Build

Anand it's lowered and spaced. Needs a bit more coil off the front. And explorer sport track steering rack swapped (4 to 3.25  turns). 

Chris: "needs moar lower"

also, chris w/ gods own channelocks ..

Dammit, you guys did all the fun stuff. What are me and Jim supposed to do tomorrow lol

That looks good.

Dangit, I'm gonna lose to a truck, aren't I. lol

irish44j said:

Dammit, you guys did all the fun stuff. What are me and Jim supposed to do tomorrow lol

Nah, there's plenty :)

Time to pass out for a while. 

Wow, what a weekend. I love this truck. Not all buttoned up, but VERY happy with where we are, (especially a little luck on a found loose ground,  damnit!). Chris especially, and everyone killed it. Will try to do more info and pics tonight,  but here's a few pics of Chris departing for home in the meantime.

Made it!  I'll make a post detailing some of the suspension stuff tomorrow:

Yay!!!

Awesomeness 

OK, so my part of this weekend's work (suspension) and maybe some snippets of other stuff.  After getting to Josh's on Saturday, I drove the truck- initial impressions were slow steering, terribly squishy and bouncy suspension, some rubbing at full lock, and a lot of bogging at low rpm.

Rear suspension:

You can drop these somewhere between 2-3" in the back by flipping the leaf spring shackle, so we did that.  Before:  

After grinding the giant rivet heads off, knocking them out with a punch, swapping them side to side, and turning everything upside down:  

Then (out of chronological order since stuff was still arriving as we worked) you need to replace the horrifically blown, actively leaking, rusty, rear shocks.  In this case we used some front Bilsteins intended for a Jeep Comanche because they're close to the right length, cheap on closeout, and have lots of damping to control the axle wrap that this beast will inevitably want to have.  The problem is, neither end has the right sort of attachment for this truck.  Step one, press out the (wrong sized) Comanche bushing in a vice; step two, cut the old B2300 shock to rescue the top bushing while praying that it's the right size; step three, celebrate as it slides right into the Bilstein!  Make sure to clock it 90 degrees so the worn part that you just cut into a little isn't loaded:

The other end is a stud, but it's right around 12mm OD, so some cutting, cheap rod ends, and a tap and a bunch of washers for spacers let us do this:  

Oh yeah, and the shocks have to mount upside down.  No big deal, practically perfect for this application!  This, along with 2" spacers on each side, drops and widens the rear enough to get us in the happy spot for static stability (track width must equal roof height or wider) while leaving a few inches of travel so the truck can still do truck stuff without slamming the axle stops.

Front suspension:  

I did some math on the springs and figured cutting about 1.5 coils would get us to the height we want (about 3-3.5" drop) with a somewhat reasonable spring rate- but I wussed out and only cut one coil at first:  

Why is the pavement wet?  Well, heat is bad for springs, so my technique is to hold a grinder with a cutoff wheel in one hand, and a hose in the other, and alternate use of the two- when the water starts steaming off the spring it's time to blast it with the hose again.  You haven't felt real danger until you're standing in a puddle holding a spinning grinder with no guard in one hand and a dripping hose in the other while hoping the water doesn't reach that suspiciously frayed looking part of the extension cord.

Removing the springs was also an ordeal in itself, since the old shocks and swaybar endlinks both had to be cut off due to rust.  I later disassembled again to cut off the extra half coil I should have chopped in the first place.  We reassembled with some KYB Gas-a-Justs and replaced the brake hoses since one was looking pretty bad, and put 2" spacers on to match the rear.

Dropping it back on the ground indicated we can now meet the static stability rules!  And also that the wheels stuck way too far out, so Josh unleashed all of his "I've been staring at wiring diagrams all day" rage on the fenders and bedsides and pulled them most of the way out- we would later roll them the last little bit with a baseball bat.  New swaybar endlinks were selected from a series of different generic cheapies to find what put the bar ends horizontal at the new ride height:  

Oh, and at some point during all that Stephen (too cool for a GRM account) did some precision circuit board soldering, Nick (95maxrider) removed fender liners and straightened the bumper with a big hammer, and Will (the neighborhood Saab guy) fabricated a significant portion of a seat mount.  Everyone except me also helped with the engine/megasquirt stuff to some degree.

Steering rack:

I think we're pioneering the B2300 quick ratio rack development, I couldn't find documentation of anyone else doing any of this silliness.  The stock rack was horribly slow at 4 turns lock to lock- the Explorer Sport Trac rack I pulled on Friday is around 30% faster and just fresher in general so there's less slop.  It seems to have a little more overall travel, too, for whatever that's worth.  BUT, as we found out after installing it, the power steering lines are totally different.  Sport Trac lines are wrong at the pump end, and B2300 lines are wrong at the rack end- so on Sunday morning while having some coffee and waking up, Josh got back on the Megasquirt and I did some research to find viable alternatives- V6 mustang, regular Explorers from certain years, and the holy grail 99 Ranger 4 cylinder were discovered as options.  For obvious reasons, it seems like the Ranger would be the best fit, but of course nobody stocks the line because it's a single year part for only one model- but the local LKQ had a 99 Ranger.  So I took Josh's BMW wagon and ran out there when it opened, snagged the lines and their integrated power steering cooler off the Ranger, and ran back.

The result?  Success!  Some slight fabricobbling had to be done on the low pressure line, but the high pressure one bolted right up and the PS cooler mounted up correctly too.  So the quick steering formula for a B2300 is 01 Explorer Sport Trac rack, 99 Ranger 2.5 lines and cooler, and splice the low pressure line somewhere.  Make sure to do an alignment because this bumped the toe out about 1/2"

On Sunday we also had the help of another Josh (irish44j) and finished up some seat mounting and a few of the suspension bits from the previous posts:  

It rapidly became clear that the MS install wasn't happening in a way that would let me drive home, so we began putting the engine back together and discovered a loose ground- how much of the drivability issue was caused by that I wonder?  We also packed some stuff up, including an "add Megasquirt later" kit in case I'm feeling particularly crazy, and tried to install the seats only to discover that we're going to need to do some cutting and welding to get them low enough (did I mention we had no welder?) to work in the truck.  It'll be a near zero budget hit, just some time.

So Josh (bluej) got to drive Betsy again before I hit the road:  

She runs better, steers WAY quicker, handles a lot better, and drives FAR better than a lowered minitruck on massive 35 series tires has any right to.  The only handling changes I want to make are some front end alignment tweaks and front bumpstop changes, since I think I can get it to corner by leaning on the outside bumpstop in a way that should work pretty well.  I also can't believe that it cruises down the highway at 80mph so smoothly and effortlessly considering it has the wrong engine, big wheel spacers of questionable origin, and suspension mods that involved more grinding and cutting tools than anything else.  I have some work to do but overall this is going pretty well.

The motor swap is running on stock Ranger bits? Or a different computer?

In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :

Stock 2.3 computer for this truck currently, and it actually runs quite well from about 3000-5500 rpm- low down in the range it's still boggy, which makes low speed driving interesting with the relatively grabby clutch.  With the new rear shocks it actually launches pretty well, though, as long as you get the revs high enough.

It got 24 mpg on the way home and has not thrown a check engine light yet.

I wonder if the 2.3 computer is tunable? I'm only asking because I have OBDII plug in emissions checks for anything younger than 25 years. No matter, I'm still interested in the whole project and the driving experience. 

In reply to mazdeuce - Seth :

Not sure- I believe it passed a plug-in test in the current configuration but Josh has the details on that.  The Megasquirt harness, once it's finished, is supposed to be fully interchangeable so that the truck can go back to "emissions mode" in about 20 minutes of work.

Chris covered most of it, and I'll fill in on the full MS setup later.  The short version is that for legality in DC, and the primary purpose of being a truck I can leave parked on the street and ready whenever, it needed to be fully emissions inspected for DC registration. That has to happen every two years till it's at least 25 years old, so the easiest way to deal with that is make it so you can swap back to stock, and then not worry about it in between. I put a lot of work into planning and sourcing the bits to make that possible, since the MS is happening at some point (see: box o' turbos waiting on the garage shelf..), but almost certainly post challenge now.

In order to get the truck just registered and inspected, the easiest way to do so without spending 500-1000 dollars on a tune setup I'd be abandoning not long after, was to make the swap work with the 2.3 ecu. I've confirmed that's doable by basically using the 2.5 longblock, and stock anger everything else. result is what we have now, it loses low end because the ports in the head flow so much more, but it picks it up more on the top end . There's a cam-swap discussion brewing to help that, but just finding that stupid loose ground helped so much. It explains a lot, and should make alfadriver happy after all the help he gave in getting it to a point it would pass inspections.

This is not making me want a minitruck less! Can't wait to see it in person.

I just wish they could tow a light car and trailer comfortably.

Nice work! Short cab/short bed are perfect unto themselves and always make me want one when I see a clean one. Wheels & tires look particularly good - what sizes are you running?

I had actually bought the wheels when I saw them close-ish for sale here on the forum (thanks, Revrico!) and knew they'd be a good looking and easy option for a 3-season fun tire on the truck. The hankook tires seemed to be a good bang for the buck option for those 3 seasons. I can't remember if the tire wear/gastropod thing had been decided by then, but it wasn't something that had been on my mind for em.

Thanks for that. The combo really suits that little truck......

Love me some Mazda minitruck! This is my daily

I look forward to seeing your truck at the Challenge and talking minis. This blue truck is my eighth Forzda rbv 

HMMMM. Thanks for sharing that. Chris and I were discussing what to paint/touch up, and were going back and forth on how to handle the bumper.

edit: you've got additional flares on that, right? What are they?

Factory flares. They came on the torsion bar trucks.

Ranger ones will fit, and are shaped differently. Either can be had in textured grey, or paintable finishes