I used to have a 87 Ranger with the 2.9 V6. The trans was built up by Valley Transmission , who back in the day did lots of the Ford race trans transmissions. So they had all the tricks in it, minus the manual valve body. Then I had Tim Lawerence (TLR) who did a bunch of class 7 trucks. We put AutoFab bent beams on the truck, TLR modified radius beams and cross member where you remove the bushings, replace the them with a big uni-ball, then cut the stock bushing to hide the uni-ball and act as a dust boot. This was a racing cheat to get more articulation, and hopefully not get caught!
. Then we took the stock spring bucket and cut the rear shock portion off, and boxed in a taller shock mount, to add a 10 inch stroke shock. The front travel was 12 inches. If I moved the shocks to the front of the I-beam I could have got 15. (Now days you would just add a coil over shock. But this truck was also built up like you would with a class 7S truck.In the rear I had a 8 stack of leaf springs from National Spring. Then TLR built a set of longer shackles that is then flipped up. This allows up to 18 inches of travel. But I did not want to cut up my bed to have shock go through, and because my Ranger had a very cool factory dual fuel tanks, I did not want to cantilever the shocks backwards. So we did the best we could keeping a 10 inch stroke shock under the bed, getting 13 inches of travel. The shocks were a Bilstien shock with TLR’s custom valving. The rear gears were a 4:10 with a true trac gear limited slip differential. The truck was a total sleeper with full metal body. Looked like a 4x4 will a 32 inch tire. Only if you really looked did you see any of the suspension mods. The biggest giveaway was the skid plate tucked under the front bumper to protect the steering and the two off road lights on the factory bumper. We chased allot of Baja races for Jimco in this truck. Used it to finish prerunning the San Felipe 250 when my prerun Baja Bug broke. It was not fast, but it worked really well and shocked allot of people as they saw it going by.
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