I have a 2001 Ranger Edge 4.0 SOHC 5 speed Manual with 148k miles that started acting really funny this week. Monday morning I start the truck to leave the house around 08:30 it was pretty cold outside being January in Utah so I hit the defroster while I scrape the ice of the windshield. Takes me a whole 2 mins to do that and get back in the truck and leave the driveway. About 10 mins into my drive the check engine light comes as the truck reaches operating temp. I put the truck in Neutral, turn the heater, and radio off so I can attempt to hear any weird noises and something sounded off, I couldn't tell what it was but something was just off. You all know when you've owned a vehicle for a period of time you just know your ****. I gently put the truck in gear and slowly let the clutch out and the whole truck start to shake pretty bad, but after about 3k RPM it would get a little better, it still didn't sound totally right and shook a great bit less but wasn't great. The Check Engine light started to flash so I pulled over to the side of the road found a route back to the house off of the freeway and pulled it into the garage.

About 2 weeks prior to this whole thing I replaced the Spark Plugs, as they had never been done before. I pulled the old ones out but not without completely destroying some of the wires. I made a run over to O'Reilly bought a set of brand new spark plug wires and installed them as well. After that the truck seemed to run fine no difference really just wanted to make sure they were done. I drove almost everyday after doing all that with no issues until this Monday.

My first thought was a misfire from a bad wire or a fowled spark plug. Maybe the store had given me shitty parts, I don't know. So I started to pull every wire one-by-one off of their corresponding plug and used one of the older plugs(like I said they were still good really)to test to see if maybe one of the wires was bad. Each wire was able to make the Plug Fire no problem. So I moved to doing the plugs, took each of them out one-by-one to test them. Every single one of them GOOD no visible problems. I got some advice from a friend who said it could possibly be the ignition coil so I went ahead and replaced it with a brand new one. nothing still the same problem.

I finally borrowed a code reader from friend and plugged it in and got a P0171 (Bank 1, System too lean) and a P0302 (Cylinder 2 Misfire). With Everything that I've replaced and done I'm at a loss and don't know what to do next. If anybody has any ideas I'd love to hear them.