That was back in May, it pretty much just sat in the stones at my house until closer to the 4th of July, when a buddy came over to help me get this project started.


We scrubbed the hell out of the hard top (it still needs a lot more work) and then yanked it off and set it on the trailer.  Then gave this thing its first bath in 10+years!

​Pulled the tailgate off; the shell is shot but the hardware is all in great shape. Started yanking out the interior and found an old mouse-house behind the real panel, along with the former tenant

We pretty much gutted the whole interior except for the dash, and then then called it quits for the day.
​
So much clean sheetmetal!

​​...and stuffed into the garage until the next time I could get around to working on it:

​So after years of wheeling and not caring, ive pretty well thrashed the body on my bronco.

​The whole cab is twisted so the full doors don't come even close to closing so we have to use the half doors any time we take the truck out, and then tarp it up so it doesn't get wet inside n the rain/snow.
So after going back and forth, we decided to go back to a bronco body on this thing. The cab/bed was cool and all, but it dosent really have much room for carrying much gear, and not being able to drive it on the road sucks. So I stared looking for a bronco project. I wanted to stay true to the trucks roots (I have owned it 16 years afterall) which meant the body has to be an 87-91. I wanted to find something clean because im not a sheetmetal guy, and the condition of the drivetrain was completely irrelevant because im just going to drop the body on my frame when im done.

So I snooped around CL for quite some time. Seen trucks come and go, but nothing really jumped out at me. Then one day I spotted a lift 4-door bronco on CL up in the Poconos. Only two pics of the exterior, but it looked like a decent buy for the price, so I made the trip. On an impulse i decided to go up there and see if it would be a decent beater to cruise around in. Unfortunately it was a bit rough around the edges, more-so than I would've liked for a street cruiser so I decded to pass on it. But while BSing with the guy, he told me about this bronco he had planned to restore, but it never really happened. So we go over to take a look at it, and its perfect. its a '90 in decent shape with no motor or trans. The perfect donor vehicle! So we struck up a deal, and I brought it home :thumbup


So here she is, in all her glory.

​It was a parked in stones under a tree for 10 years, so while being absolutely covered in moss, appeared to be in decent shape!

He had put a body lift in it (homemade, about 2"), and he built his own shackle flip for the rear with some extra leafs stuffed in there for some more lift. And there it sat, never got around to lifting the front, or doing anything else to it.

​This isnt really the beginning, this is arguably Phase Four.  Five?  I guess it depends on how you look at it.
i could consider Phase One from bone stock to when i had the 36" iroks, but Phase Two is definitely when i did the one-tons and 42s.  Phase Three has to be when i put the pickup cab on.  But does that make Phase Four the big block?  or is that an extension of Phase Three?  Like Phase Three, Part 2 or something.  It wasnt exactly planned, so im gonna go with that.  So that means we're entering Phase Four.

Here she is, an all her glory!

Went to go look at a truck up in the Poconos yesterday, and while that one was a bust, this was in his yard, and apparently also for sale. It is a '90 with 29k original miles! The rear fenders have a bit of cancer along with the tailgate, but the rest of the body is 100%. Definitely very clean for a truck that originally came from nj.
Fell into the hands of the current (now previous) owner because the motor blew. Currently has no engine/trans/tcase in it, along with a new body lift, and a shackle flip in the rear.

So, what to do with it????? Well............
...my bronco is gonna be a bronco again! The p/u cab on my frame is twisted pretty badly and the whole front clip is thrashed from years of not-so-gentle wheelin. So ive decided to go back to my roots, and put another bronco body on my frame! Its gonna take a little bit of work (I have to remove my custom cab x-member and reinstall the factory brackets on the frame), and since its a 90 the dash harness wont work with my truck so ill have to swap the harness. And of course slice the fenders wide open.  Im sure theres a few other things that wont work as well (dont think the exhaust will). But im hoping to start tearing into the donor this summer, and then start tearing into mine this fall. After 16 years I feel its time to build some new bumpers for it, roll cage, etc, so I don't expect it to go super fast, but it should be awesome when its done.

So yeah, flame on!

So here we go! For those that don't know, this event is currently on-going; it started Thursday and will continue through til Sunday.
First off, let me say that the FSB presence at the Round Up this year was incredible! Tons of FSBs everywhere!  Sorry I didn't get to say Hi to everyone, we weren't doing the whole pic thing, so we kinda just unloaded, aired down and went off into the park.

Me & Ox decided to go on Friday, to get some wheelin in with Darrel, because he's usually one of the only FSB'ers dumb enough to keep goin wheelin with us!  But seriously, we limited ourselves to one day because weve got another trip coming up, and usually one of us breaks something big

Anyways, enough babbling, on to the pics!
From left to right:
me, Darrel, Ox

We went over to the NE side, and went straight to Outer Limits, which is wayyyy far away from everything.

...and unfortunately this is where Darrel t​he d.side motor mount, which lead to a torn trans mount, & the front d.shaft & trans linkage came apart.
We had to pull him down off the climb.  Getting the winch cable re-set, his truck deicded to roll away! Fortunately, I was parked behind him. Unfortunately, with the angle, his bumper went right under mine and we smashed his tailgate up pretty good.  We also bent his front right leaf during the extraction process, but he has another at home so its not the end of the world.

From here we were able to get the trans linkage and the d.shaft back together, and he was able to limp it out of the park under its own power.

We dropped Darrel's rig off in the parking lot, and he rode with me/ox the rest of the day. We went over to the south side to run Cemetary.  I shot a vid of Ox coming up the hill climb/exit, he makes it look easy (it kinda was).
From there we went over to the West side to run Trail 20 (awesome new-ish black trail), then 13a, then we cut thru Rock Creek and headed into Death Trap

​This runs out to 23, which loops around to the Power lines. But by then it was already 5pm, so we headed back to the parking lot and loaded up to go home.

Not a lot of pics, but it was still a good day of wheelin; lots of good trails run, and we did ~15-18 miles so we definitely covered some ground. Darrel shot some pics/vids, so hopefully he gets them online soon!

There is a thread running over on FSB with pics from some of the other people that attended, you can check it out here. 

Got some new tires on Tuesday!
Found a local shop that could get 35" BFGs for my 16.5s, so I ordered a set.

Ive missed these tires! The Goodyears were ok, but performance-wise, these tires are phenomenal. For those that remember I used to run these, but then for a while a few years back no one could get any. I thought they were disco-d (like most other 16.5s) and gone forever (which is when I switched to the 37s), but these days theres plenty of em out there. So I happily jumped on the chance to get another set. Only been on a couple days, but man I love em.

And for a little bit of tech, I have them balanced with Counteract Balancing Beads, which are basically the same thing as Equal (you can get them on Ebay). Little glass beads inside the tire. Glass is nice because it wont get all clumpy from moisture like the cheaper ones that are basically sand. I used 12oz bags which is a bit much, probably could've gotten away with 10oz, but a little extra doesn't hurt.  And theyre smooth as glass on the highway.

Some misc pics from Saturday:

This was a pretty sweet EB with a 6bt under the hood!

​Taking a break (literally) while the same EB replaced a hub. This was on DeathTrap, which is a pretty awesome trail.

Another cool EB on the trail with us today. Those 39.5s sure look small next to these rocks!

​Deathtrap leads into the far end of Rock Creek. So since we had time while waiting for a locking hub, he decided to run the creek. I decided to follow.

Somebody was not having a good day, found a damn-near new ujoint in the middle of the Creek, missing a few caps. I bet someone dropped it.

Got to the other end, and stumbled upon some other FSBs, iuncluding Jim and his too-pretty-to-wheel bronco.  So shiny!

​From there we went over to Crawl Daddy:

That's more or less all I got form the day.
You can view my full photogallery of pics from friday, here, and from saturday, here.
Theres a thread on the whole event over on FSB, located here.

The annual Bronco Roundup, at Rausch Creek!

Hers the obligatory group-photo pic from Friday morning:

Me Ox & Darrel lining up for the trailride

​Such a nice, clean, unbroken windshield:

Heading into the park:

This is where it got ugly.  From here we moved on to Crawler's Ridge, and Ox broke his rig.  Seems the bolts that hold the passenger side steering arm onto the knuckle sheared off, and he lost all of his steering:

What youre looking at here, is what happens when two massive Grade 8.8 bolts break, and the Mog steering arm comes off the passenger knuckle. Because both the tierod & draglink attach to it, it left Ox with basically no steering at all.
I left to go get a trailer while several others from FSB stayed behind to help ox get up, turned around, and then back down off the obstacle, so we could extract him. They built this crazy contraption out of a come-along, several short chains & some straps to sort-of get it steering again, atleast enough to get it maneuvered down the bypass, after it got winched up & off the obstacle.
During that time I unhooked my trailer from the tow-rig, hitched it to the back of my bronco via a home-brew hitch I built for moving the trailer around the yard, and then drug it all the way back to the scene of the incident:

​During my trip out & back the rest of them were hard at work getting him turned around, so I could back up into the trail and we could load him up at the bottom of the bypass/exit:

From there we towed him all the way out of the park, over to the emergency exit near Route 209

Here we unloaded his truck, and drove back to the parking lot in mine, where we jumped in Ox's tow rig and came back for his bronco. I left my bronco hitched to the trailer in Rausch's lot overnight as me & ox were planning on coming back Saturday to go wheelin again anyway with my rig.

460 for the win, it honestly did not care at all that ox's rig was on the trailer behind me. It was pretty awesome to see.
It took us 5 hours to extract his bronco and get back to camp which was half-decent I thought considering the situation, but it meant we missed dinner Friday night since we didn't get back until after 8.

​Ok so here we go, MEB's annual Winter Ride @ Rausch Creek.

There was a pretty good turnout, it looked like a dozen rigs were there yesterday, and half of em were FSBs.
Unfortunately, with the crazy deep slushy snow, we ended up breaking into smaller groups, because there were many places where a rig on 35s was struggling to go. It was pretty nasty out there.

The worst of it was the parking lot though, it was a sheet of ice in the morning!

Pretty much right off the bat I seized a caliper and it was dragging HARD. Had to pull the rear left off and remove it because it was killing me in the snow. Im sure theres a pic of it somewhere.
Ground clearance for the win! The group I rolled with was on a minimum of 36s, and people were dragging their diffs everywhere.

​Considering that we were cutting paths through fresh snow all day long, this made for some interesting challenges at times.

This was a pretty nice EB, but the Fun Countrys were not the best choice for the snow. He had lots of traction issues, despite being locked front/rear

​digging in pretty hard. snow was almost knee deep in this area of the park

​You wont see a rock, unless you get stuck and start digging; the snow was so deep that no one hit bottom unless they got stuck

​This was a pretty wicked hill climb; Chris tried to get to the top and was almost successful before getting stuck. The dude in the blue EB (sorry I forgot his name) was going for it but back down, I assume due to lack of traction; the FCs were not the best tire for this heavy snow

​Ryan givin 'er hell on the left path

​You can see in these next two, he starts digging in pretty good, but eventually got stuck and had to back down

We went for it and made it all the way up the right path, so im hoping some pics or vids of that show up!

...and finally a panoramic my bud shot on his phone:

All said, I had an awesome time. The seized caliper really sucked the power down, we did way better after it was off the truck. Darrel did pretty good but being behind me most of the day I didn't really get many pics of him. I ran into several other FSB members, but we all got split up early on due to smaller rigs getting stuck, and atleast one broken axleshaft, so I never got to wheel with anyone else.

There's more pics from the trip over on FSB.

Half-cab Tracker!

​...complete with diamond-plate bed, and soft-top folded down with window cut into it

​yep, plywood wall, and lots of spray foam. Cant imagine why this ended up here!

Cool old Ford

​Burned up Scout. One of many scouts in the yard

​Another stubbed off van!

​This one was done really well, we had a hell of a time finding the seam. Whoever built this thing took their time with it.

​complete with flatbed!