Hi everyone! After a week long read through of a few forums I decided on this one as it looks to have the best informed members, so hopefully we can help each other out. I don't own a Ranger, but the Auto Glass & Muffler shop I work at just bought an '02 2wd with a blown motor for the purpose of dropping a 5.0 in it to use as a "delivery" truck. We just had a 99 Explorer dropped off for the donor parts needed. I'll be documenting everything and will probably start a diy/wip thread soon. It should be a fun toy when we are done, and a good companion to our other engine swapped rides us mechanics drive (we kinda like putting engines in stuff they don't belong in :) ) just not as fast lol. To make this more interesting, this is being done by a Chevy guy and a BMW fanatic(me). What could go wrong, right?

 

Welcome to R-F.

5.0s in Rangers are fun

 

Thank you. We are trying to decide wether or not to go with a mustang intake from Edelbrock, but we know we're gonna cam it and go wild with a port job on the heads. Headers will possibly be hand made because we want to show off our exhaust fabrication skills.

 

If your engine has GT40P heads, stick with the stock intake IMO. It will most likely handle whatever you do to the rest of the engine. Do some gasket matching and polish it out, and you'll be good to go.

As you can see in my signature, I did quite a bit with my donor engine. The Torque Monster headers are the only headers that will work unless you build custom ones, which would be really cool. All other headers will have interference issues.

As far as cams go, what are you looking for? A real lopey idle or something a little more mild? Mine is pretty mild, but the lope is still noticeable. It was designed for a carb setup, but I had it custom tuned so it didn't matter.

 

Good read here on the swap you will be doing: MudSlanger's Explorer 5.0 Swap In A 2000 Ford Ranger

 

Our engine does indeed have the gt40p heads, and after looking at intakes we've decided on gasket matching and some polishing. We know we want a lopey sound, but don't want to sacrifice driveability so we are looking at options in the 270-282 range. Still working on who or where to get it tuned at. Since our donor truck had the cats chopped off already we are just going to use aftermarket hi-flow ones which will help with exhaust routing anyways.

Thank you RonD. I have been reading that thread over and over actually. Great write up!