Inwood, W. Va.
In the late 90’s my dad bought a fire engine red Ford Bronco II at a used car lot.
I had just bought an Apache motorhome – I had tested it by towing it in my mother’s sedan and it blew the engine all the way to Sherando Lake, about 40 miles away.
So he bought this 1989 Bronco II.
Don’t confuse this with the OJ Simpson Broncos – this was a small SUV. The Bronco II was an SUV body placed on a Ford Ranger chassis. Except for the body, you could take almost anything off a Ranger from that year and bolt it onto the Bronco.
Now, this SUV was not like the glorified vans you see today. This thing was a truck. As SUV’s became soccer mom mobiles, my dad always made a point of saying “they got them in knots back then”.
And boy did they. It was a two-door, so you had to leave the passenger seat to get through. The seats were dimpled vinyl, so in the summer when you put on shorts, your thighs looked like craters on the moon. The air conditioning worked sometimes, but the only reliable form of air was what my dad called “2/55” – two windows down at 55 mph.
In the back seat where I sat, without a seat belt, dodging the ash from my father’s cigarette, the windows didn’t roll down, so it was effectively a greenhouse. Many trips, I felt dizzy from the heat.
Four-wheel drive wasn’t a knob you turned on the dashboard. There was a separate stick shift for that on the floor. Sucker was stiff so it would take a try or two but he would go in.
However, my dad had auto locking wheel hubs for 4 wheel drive. It would tell me to go out to a light and turn that dial on the hubs to lock them out.
In the trunk area, I had boxes of apples from one of the orchards. There he put the groceries to prevent them from sliding.
By God, we’d go anywhere in that thing. Our first vacation that I can remember, we went to Cherokee Country in North Carolina, taking the camper in that thing. I remember lying in the back seat, wrapped in a Batman blanket, looking up at the mist of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
You could argue that my father was a cheap man, but if you ask him, he was frugal. After being robbed too many times at mechanic shops, he made it a mission to teach himself how to work on cars.
So when the Bronco started knocking whenever I drove it above 55 mph, he put in an engine hoist and removed the engine and spent two months rebuilding it.
Going down to the basement, he had that suction cup disassembled: the crankshaft here, a head there.
I was too young to really help, but he let me stay and get him tools the Saturday the engine fell out again.
Through my father’s cursing and yelling and broken knuckles, I stuck to working on cars. It wasn’t long before I was probably about 10 years old that my dad had me change the oil in the Bronco.
I screwed up – I squeezed the oil filter, breaking the seal and causing the oil to come out the inlet. To my surprise, my father wasn’t angry at all – he chalked it up to a learning experience.
When the brake pads needed changing, my dad had me by his side to change them. He did the driver’s side to show me, then placed the ratchet in my hand with a pry tube and had me change the passenger side.
As the truck got older, it became harder and harder to find parts. Almost every week, my dad would shop the Valley Trader, the local pre-internet Craigslist, and look for parts.
So when the clutch went out, it also took a transmission from the Valley Trader, so we could change everything at once.
It was the summer, my dad was a substitute teacher, so I had all day, every day, to work on it. and I was beside him, dragged underneath. Heck, I had my first mechanic-related injury that time: when we took it off the stand to see if it would work, I pinched my finger on the bracket, took a chunk out of the tip, and bled like a stuck pig .
As the truck approached 300,000 miles, it was time for another engine rebuild. As a teacher of mine once said, my father was in “a time and money war for common sense.” Found a 1988 Bronco II at Valley Trader for $500.
That Bronco was regulated for farm use. It worked fine, they were just fixing to get it off their hands. So we piled into our Bronco, drove to Woodstock, Virginia, and he drove it back. When he parked it in our driveway, it stayed there for almost a decade.
We dubbed it “The Junker” – this truck became our Napa Auto Parts.
The first course was to change the seats – the Junker had Eddie Bauer, which were suede and smooth. This only lasted one afternoon.
Then came the engine change – we changed it in a day or two.
When I was 16, I removed the transmission myself and sold it to the Valley Trader. A year or two later, me and the strongest man in the county towed The Junker to a junkyard and made $400 off it.
When it came time to drive, I was given the family sedan, a 1997 Ford Taurus called “The Green Machine.” The Bronco II had been ridden hard and gotten wet; at that time it had 450,000 on the body and frame.
I really wanted to drive it so I took some money I had saved up and my dad threw it where I was low and did my first engine rebuild.
I was 16-17 at the time; my father immediately told me that his job was to “advise and consult.” He had me read an old machine shop textbook he had bought years ago when he did his first rebuild. He made me read Chilton’s guide to the Bronco II/Ranger.
Then we took it out, put it on a motor stand and since I had time, I worked on it.
It took me a summer and a box of detergent to clean the pieces. Then we had to rush out and wait for the machine shop to redo the heads, clean the block and polish the crankshaft.
Little by little, I put it back together, spending free afternoons after school or work hunched over the engine, fitting it.
The day came to turn it around. After spraying some starting fluid on, I fired it up.
The whole truck shook and the engine sounded like a thousand pennies rattling around in a dryer.
My father yelled, “Turn it off!”
“What the hell was that?” I asked
“I don’t know, but something is wrong,” he said. “Did you put oil on it?”
I put oil in it, did it go down into the sump? I removed the oil cap and metal shavings poured out.
“That’s not right,” I said.
“You must have missed something,” he said.
I rummaged around in the basement, seeing what part I missed.
On the bench were small white boxes, labeled “Main Bearings”.
For the mechanically inclined, you know very well that this is a disaster. For the layman, it’s pretty simple: they’re bearings that allow the crankshaft to turn. Without them, it’s metal on metal, which means you’ll have a stuck motor.
At about 450,000 miles on the frame and body, the Bronco II — its fire engine red paint peeling, its luster long faded, the Eddie Bauer seats stained and damp — was dead.
The strongest man in the county had some cousins who could use him for parts – we sold him for a cool $800 and left him.
They came and loaded it onto a trailer while I was at work. Maybe it was better that way.
Even though I killed Bronco II, a part of him still lives inside me; thanks to this i know you can take apart almost any ford model with a 10mm, 13mm and 15mm socket.
Every time I change a wheel bearing, I think of my fat covered dad fighting with it on the gravel. Every time I change the oil, I make sure to turn the filter tight, but not closed.
He taught me to take my time, cross my I’s and dot my T’s.
And every time I see a Bronco II on the road, which doesn’t happen often, even in this zip code, I can’t help but smile.
