Tag Bronco restoration

I’m going to get you a little bit closer. Why? Because I’m a nice dad. No, you’re not. I’m not? That’s not very nice to say. Why am I not a nice dad? You’re a good dad. I am a good dad. No. No. Hug right here. All right, fine. Get out, you hooligan. Out. Out. Out. He’s telling you to get out. Bye, girls. Love you. Yep. Have a good day. Be good. Bye. Bye, Dad. Bye, kid. Here. Howdy, folks. Ed here. Welcome back to Bono’s Garage. Today, we’re trying something different. I’m going to call it Bullno’s Garage on the road. You guys have to let me know if you like this format or not. It’s something new. Basically, it’s just going to be me off the top of my head, driving on the way to work. During the summer, I’m sure you guys have noticed that I just don’t drop videos. I’ve said it before; I may sound like a broken record, but I just don’t have any time with the kids, family obligations, work, and everything else going on during the summer. There’s just no time to produce and film videos. I don’t have a lot of time, even in the evenings, but what I do have is a 20-minute commute to work. So, I think I’m going to try this little thing where you and I just sit in my truck on my way to work and talk. It’s not really a conversation because you’re not talking back to me, but it’s kind of like a podcast type thing, except it’s mostly just a YouTube version of that. Let me know if you like this because if you do, if you find it entertaining, then I’ll keep doing it. If you don’t, then I won’t. I have no problem not doing something if you guys aren’t interested in it. It’s just going to be talking about things like bullnose-related stuff, garage-related stuff, automotive-related stuff, and it’s just off the top of my head about what I find interesting or what I’ve worked on lately. I’m still working on stuff even though I’m not doing a lot of videos during the summer. I don’t have a lot of time, but at night after the kids go to bed, I can tinker in the garage a little bit or work on some things. I try not to work on the trucks too much without you guys there. I’ve done quite a bit of work on the Bronco and got it running. I have an interesting story about that too, which I’ll get to at some point. I’m not going to work on the F-150 without doing videos on it, but I also work on all the other garage-related stuff. For instance, I’m trying to teach myself how to weld. I’ve always found welding fascinating. How cool is it to stick two pieces of metal together with fire? That’s pretty neat. But I’ve never really gotten into it; I’ve never had the chance. It’s super useful. The number of times in my life that I’ve thought, “Man, I’d really like to get these two pieces of metal together” is way too high. So, I figured, you know what, I’ll learn how to weld. There’s a local place that has classes, but I don’t have time for that. YouTube is a thing, and welders are fairly affordable for the most part now. I thought, let’s go out and get myself a welder and give that a try to see if I can teach myself how to weld. I know I’m going to miss some things, and teaching myself is going to handicap me a little bit from the beginning because there are things that a pro or even a teacher would know that they could tell me right up front. I may teach myself bad habits and all that kind of stuff, and I understand that. But it’s something I want to teach myself and get into anyway. Ultimately, the goal is to hopefully get good enough to weld body panels. The Bronco has a little bit of rust right now. For the Northeast or near the coast, it’s not hardly any rust at all, but for down here, it’s actually quite a bit. There are a couple of places where there are holes in the body panels that are completely rusted through. I’d like to learn how to cut out a piece, weld in a replacement, grind it flat, and make it look nice so that you could paint it and not even know it was done. I don’t know that I’ll ever get that good, but that’s a goal. I do feel like I can at least get good enough to potentially weld a mount for a seat. I’ve got a back seat from a 2005 F250. It’s a rear seat with nice fold-down cup holders in the middle, and I want to put that in the F-150. Of course, those seats are not going to fit. They’ll fit dimensionally, but the mount points aren’t the same. So, I’m going to have to fabricate something. I want to get good enough to the point where I could at least fabricate that and feel confident in the welds I do so that I’m not going to go flying out of the vehicle at 70 mph with the seat attached to me because it’s no longer attached to the truck. Hopefully, I can get to that point. I’m not there yet, but welding is an art. Respect to you guys that do it because it looks easy. These guys on YouTube make welding look super easy. They just get out the gun, set the machine, strike an arc, and do some stuff, and then it makes a stack of dimes, right? But it’s nowhere near that easy to do. Look, it’s fairly easy to use a welder to get a couple of pieces of metal to stick together strong enough that if you bang it with a hammer, it’s not going to come apart. That’s not that hard. But making them look good and be truly structurally sound so that they can work in an application is a different story. I hope to get there. You can set yourself up for failure right from the beginning if you don’t get your spool speed correct, your wire feed speed, or your power levels. You need to use the right diameter of wire. You have to know how thick the metal is that you’re working on and what kind of metal it is. You have to make sure the metal’s clean. You need to have the right equipment. I went out and got myself a Captain MP205. This is not an advertisement for them. They have advertisements all over YouTube for this thing, but I’m not advertising for them. I thought about reaching out to them to see if they would give me one for free, but I’m just going to pay for my own stuff every now and then anyway. That way, I can talk to you guys about it without having to worry about some corporate sponsor. So far, so good. It seems to work pretty well. It’s a little expensive, but it does all the stuff right. It does MIG and TIG, pulse MIG, pulse TIG, and it even has a plasma cutter, which is cool. I’ve never plasma cut anything before in my entire life. That’s actually a lot harder than you’d think it would be, too. I tried plasma cutting, and I’m wiggling all over the place. The plasma cutter is like a lightsaber; it has no resistance whatsoever. It’s just a plasma arc slicing through metal like a hot knife through butter. It’s awesome, but it’s actually pretty hard to be straight. It makes a mess if you don’t have the settings right. I’ve found that using a cutoff wheel is better than the plasma cutter for me because it’s quicker to set up, and it cuts straighter, leaving cleaner lines. The plasma is undeniably cool, but I’m not great at it, so I’m wandering all over the place. Anyway, it’s got all that stuff, and I’m teaching myself with flux MIG for now because buying a bottle of gas, 75/25, is a whole thing. They’re expensive. You can get a bottle of gas for MIG on Amazon for 300 bucks, and it’s full. The problem is that I don’t even know if a place around here will fill it. What’s that about? It’s a legal bottle; it holds gas and has all the stamps and markings. It’s been tested and everything. It should be fine, but I guess some places won’t do it unless you buy their bottle because they want to make the money. To be fair, I haven’t checked with any place around here whether they will refill a bottle from Amazon. I have an 8 to 5 job, and all these places are open from 8 to 5, so I can’t just pop out of work and go down to the welding shop to ask about a bottle. I may have to take a day off one of these days to run some errands and make that one of my stops. Anyway, I’m teaching myself with flux, and it’s not bad. There’s a lot of spatter, but I feel like I’m doing pretty good. I’m building a welding table, which is the first thing you build when you’re learning to weld. I got some old angle iron from my father-in-law and found a couple of guys selling some old angle on Facebook Marketplace. The top is going to be an old industrial shelf, 4×2, that I just had laying around. I just tossed it together, and the angle is actually pretty nice. If you’re from the Southwest or some of the drier places, you know that a lot of less advantaged people will use what’s called a swamp cooler instead of an air conditioning unit. Swamp coolers suck, but they’re better than nothing, especially when it’s 100 degrees outside. Basically, you run some water over an element, and a big fan blows the humidity into your house, helping to keep the air a little cooler. They put these on top of roofs, and to get them up there, you need some kind of scaffold or mount. A lot of guys make those mounts out of angle; they just weld some angle together and plop it on top of a roof to hold the swamp cooler. Many of those are just hanging out in salvage yards around here. My father-in-law had a couple of those laying around, so I got those from him, cut the pieces off, cleaned them up, welded them together, and now I have the beginnings of a welding table. But like I said, I’m using a cutoff wheel. I bought a big cutoff wheel for my chop saw. I know you’re not supposed to use a chop saw. for cutting metal like that. It’s not really designed for that, but it works. It makes nice straight cuts, which is important when you’re building a table because you don’t want it to be wobbly, right? So, I got the table and I put some casters on it, and I’m working to put it together. But man, welding is an art. I feel like I’m not doing too bad. I’m definitely not stacking dimes, but I’m trying to learn how to see the puddle and how to manipulate it, and what pattern I like the best. There’s a lot of muscle memory involved. You have to know what angle to be at and your stick out, and how far away you are. I find myself wandering away as I’m going down the line, and that’s a problem. You have to keep the angle right. There’s a lot of stuff that you don’t think about, and you shouldn’t have to think about it if you’re a good welder. You just do it, and it comes naturally to you. I’m just waiting to get to that point. But like I said, I may never get to the point where I can do body work. I may end up trying TIG one of these days to see if that’ll be better for body work. But again, I want to get at least decent with the fundamentals of MIG before I do that stuff. Anyway, it’s fun though. I enjoy it. I look forward to doing it, but it’s a process. I got this MP 205, and it’s like an $800 machine, which I had to save up to get. But then you can’t just buy the machine; you’ve got to have all the stuff. You need a helmet because, god forbid, you don’t have an auto-darkening helmet. You may as well just throw in the towel. So, you have to get one of those. They’re not super expensive, but the stuff adds up. You need gloves, and a welding jacket or shirt to keep yourself from getting burned. You have to have the wire and the consumables, a cart, and a table. I’m building my own, but you still have to get the materials for that because not all the materials I have are from the junk pile. You need some stuff to stitch things together. It gets expensive, but I’m having a good time. I have a whole wish list full of things on Amazon to try to make my life better when it comes to welding. Who knows, it may be the flavor of the month for me. One of the issues I have in my life is that I get excited about something and I’m all in for a few weeks or a couple of months, or maybe even a year, depending on what it is, and then I just lose interest and move on to something else. So, we’ll see if welding is that thing for me. Luckily, the YouTube thing and the F-150 thing have stayed pretty well cemented. I’m keeping myself from playing video games at night because if I do, I’ll get sucked in and then I won’t make videos or do anything else in my spare time, which I don’t have much of. I’m teaching myself, and I’ll show you guys the welding table once it’s done. I’m pretty happy with it. I have some cool features planned, like a vice mount that rotates and some other neat stuff. I want to add my own touch and make it neat. Hopefully, one day I’ll be able to do the Bronco thing and weld some body panels together. Now, I look around and every piece of metal I see is an opportunity. I can build something out of that. I’m planning to build an engine stand, a run stand, with all the gauges, fuel tank, and radiator mount because those are expensive too. If I can build my own, that’s a win. But that’s one of those practical applications where you have to ensure you have good solid welds because, god forbid, the engine flops off while it’s running. It’s a learning experience, and I’m kind of a scatterbrain. I constantly set tools down and forget where I put them. I spend half of my time looking for tools, and I know I do that, but I still do it. I’m especially scatterbrained when it comes to something I’m not familiar with or new at. I was cutting some angle irons for this welding table and dropped a piece of angle iron right on top of a brand new set of Basset racing wheels. I think it’s Basset; I always mix it up with Barrett. I found a set of really nice painted red wagon wheels for the Bronco because I like that classic look. I was looking for a set, and some guy had them for sale on Facebook. I thought, “That’s perfect,” and he advertised them as five on five and a half. I brought them home and tried to put my hub on them, but the holes didn’t line up. I measured, and it’s five on four and a half. That’s on me for not checking it, right? So, I didn’t check it, and now I have these wheels I need to sell. In the midst of trying to sell these wheels, I found someone on Facebook selling Basset racing wheels, and I really like the look of those. I need a different lug nut for those since they’re racing wheels, but that’s okay; I’ll figure it out. I went out and got those, had them in my garage, and dropped a piece of angle iron. It hit the back of one of the wheels right where the bead seat is and left a divot. I believe the divot is big enough that it might cause a tire not to seat and hold air. However, they are steel wheels, and I’m learning how to weld, so I might be able to fix it by welding. I might try pulse welding for that because I think it will be better at controlling the heat and not blowing through. But I’ve never done pulse welding before, so I’ll need to test that on a piece of scrap angle first. It’s interesting that learning how to weld caused me to drop something onto a wheel that I can now fix by welding, now that I kind of know how to do it. We’ll see. By the way, these Basset racing wheels aren’t street legal. The ones I got aren’t even marked, so that’s another thing we’ll have to contend with. I will probably talk about that in another episode because I’m pulling into my parking lot as we speak. So, like I said, let me know if you like this format. It’s just me sitting in a truck talking, but it’s what I have time to do. It’s easy for me to edit these and get them out to you quickly. If you like this, I will keep doing it. I have all kinds of topics I could ramble about. I like to talk; I can hear myself talk. Anyway, thanks again so much for watching, guys. We’ll see you next time. She’s rough around the edges, but she’s doing fine. Getting things to shine at Moon Knows Garage. She’s considered divine. Thanks again for watching. We’ll see you next time.

You know guys, sometimes doing YouTube is hard, and it takes a lot of time to make videos and a lot of time to sit down and do the research and write the scripts and do all this stuff. So I thought this week I’d try to catch up a little bit, just do a real quick simple video about my plans for the Bullnose. You know, I haven’t done one of those in a while, and that way you guys can kind of see what the plans for the Bullnose are going to be. So, uh, oh, I, uh, yeah, you already know the plans for this Bullnose. I mean, the plan for this Bullnose. Hello, hi folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage, and meet Bullnose number two. She’s a 1982 Ford Bronco. Just picked her up this weekend from my actual friend that I’ve got in another town over. He saw my channel, went, ‘Hey, I got a Bullnose rotting out in my yard. You want to come pick her up and add her to your list of projects?’ I thought, ‘Ah, you know what? Why not? Because one Bullnose is never enough, right? Mongo’s Garage, mm, I’m coming for you. I got two now!’ Actually, no, I will never have as many Bullnoses as those dudes have. That is crazy. Anyway, I just thought I would introduce you and let you take a look and talk a little bit about what my plans are.

So this old girl is much rougher than my ’85, but one thing I love about her is that she has a manual transmission. Of course, being a Bronco, she’s a 4×4. She’s pretty rough, but you know, that’s okay because I’m going to cut my teeth on my ’85 and learn my way in and out of these things really, really well, and then we will start restoring this girl right here. Now, as you can see, she does have a little bit of rust coming in down through here and some back over here. My guess is, I’m not sure if you can see that from the camera. I guess you can. And so my guess is that the guy who the previous owner had was doing some mudding and some off-roading and stuff, and those tend to be the places where the mud and the grime and the stuff gets caught up in the fender wells and up inside of here. And so that’s where a lot of dirt and debris and G got caught up in there. As a matter of fact, I can see some, um, already in there. See if I can feel the dust coming out of there. Dust and dirt with grunge and stuff in there. You can actually see where there’s some rocks and dirt caught up inside of there. So my guess is that that stuff got wet and just stayed wet for a while, packed up in there, and that’s where that rust happens.

You got the same thing over by the tailgate. You can see pretty clearly down here on the bottom there. So this tailgate is pretty much roached. I could probably fix this, I guess, but I don’t think I’m going to. They make repop tailgates for these, so I’ll probably just go ahead and do that. The rear window, unfortunately, doesn’t go up and down. I think that’s probably because the motor is busted. So the rear window has been down for a long time, and so that’s allowed the elements to get in here. So the inside of this, especially in the back, is pretty well roached out. But you know, it wouldn’t be a project if it was easy. So my current plan is to take the tailgate off, replace it with a new one. Probably I’ll cut some panels out of this and use them to fill in some of the body areas and the other parts of the truck that are a little bit rusted out. Teach myself how to weld body panels and do some fill and that kind of stuff, just kind of make it look nice. This one, the plan is not to be a show truck like my other truck is. This one is actually going to be something a little bit different.

So my plan for this truck is to be a desert crawler. We’re out here in the desert Southwest. There’s a lot of trails and mountains and stuff here, so I figure I could, uh, you know, it’s kind of pretty much already set for it, right? That’s what a Bronco is. So, uh, I’m not going to go like full pre-run or anything, but just, you know, give it like maybe a 4-inch lift with a 1-inch body lift, and I’ll put some bigger tires on it. You know, it’s already got the 49 in the rear, and it’s got a J44 TTB in the front. And I think, uh, you know, if I just beef up the components for both of those, that should give me what I need to be able to go out and do some serious desert crawling around here. You know, just kind of clean it up and clean up the rust and make sure that it runs right. Now, it’s not roadworthy, unfortunately. Now, it does run, and it actually runs like a top. It’s got an inline six in it, which is awesome, and I think the inline six in this thing runs almost as good as the inline six in my ’85. Now, of course, you guys that are paying attention to my channel all the time know that I’m pulling the inline six out of the ’85 and putting a 351 Windsor in and stroking it to 408. That is not what’s happening to this thing. You guys don’t have to worry. This truck is keeping the inline six. I probably will pull the inline six out of this and do some refreshing on it. I may decide to do some mods to it. You know, there’s some talk in my channel comments about, you know, did you see this where they turboed inline sixes and all this stuff? You know, I might look into some of that stuff. I don’t know that I have the chops for a project like that yet, but you know, by the time I get done building my Windsor and stuff, maybe I’ll feel more comfortable around that stuff, so I might give it a try. Anyway, but regardless, the inline six in this thing is a puller. It’s a workhorse. It got me up on the trailer no problem. There’s some fuel issues, so you have to actually, uh, here, you know what? I’ll show you. There we go. Ah, all right, so there we go. There’s the old inline six in there, and right now the only way I can get it to run is to throw some fuel in a water bottle like this and spray some fuel down in the carb, and then she’ll run. And she runs really, really good. The inline six in this purrs like a kitten, so I’m really happy about that. But, um, I’m not sure what’s going on with the fuel line. I’m not sure why it can’t pull fuel from the fuel tank. I got to look into that. The brakes are basically shot. When we dropped it back off the trailer, I had to actually put it in gear and pop the clutch to make sure that it didn’t roll back into my wall over here. So, uh, yeah, the brakes are pretty much shot. I got to do a complete brake job. I’ve already got a video series on my complete brake job on the other truck, so I won’t bore you with doing that whole thing again. But at least I know what I’m doing there, so I’ll do that. It needs new parking brake. Yeah, obviously. I mean, there’s no, uh, coating in it. There’s, uh, I don’t have any idea what the condition of the oil is. Um, you know, I got to look at all that stuff. But the engine itself runs really well. And you know, my thought was that even a worst-case scenario, the engine in this turned out to not run very well, I can always pull the 300 six out of my other truck and pop it in here and use that. But I don’t think I’m going to have to. I think I can just use the 300 that’s in here, and we’ll see. You know, I’ll get them both out at some point and see which one I want to use for my rebuild.

But yeah, so if you were paying attention to the engine when I had it closer up here, one thing you’ll notice that this truck does not have is air conditioning. And if you’ve watched a couple of my videos before, you know that I specifically bought my other truck because it has air conditioning and because it’s so damn hot down here in the Southwest when it gets to be in the summer. So, uh, that’s kind of okay for this build. Again, this is not going to be an around-town cruiser, really. It’s going to be mostly going out in the desert and having fun. So most of the time, I think this will have windows down, top off, that kind of stuff. But, uh, I still think I want to put AC in it, so I may make a video series about putting AC in a non-AC Bullnose. Um, because that’s, you know, I think that’s worth the content. And I actually do have a dash already from an AC Bullnose truck that I might be able to use as parts and pieces for this. I don’t know how hard that’ll be. I haven’t actually done the research to see how hard it’ll be to put an AC in a non-AC truck, but there are kits that you can use that’ll do that even if you don’t use the factory AC. So, um, yeah, we’ll see how that goes.

All right guys, here we are underneath the Bronco, and you can get a good look at what’s going on down here. There’s the Dana 44 front TTB, and, uh, let’s see, this, believe it or not, is an NP435 transmission. This is the same manual transmission that I got in the ’85. Um, with these trucks for a manual, it’s either going to be a T18 or an NP435, and you can tell this was an NP435 because it’s got the PTO cover on the passenger side right there. You can also see the drain plug is indicative of an NP435 too. So, uh, yeah, same transmission, and that transmission is going to stay in here because NP435 is basically bulletproof, and it’s perfect for a desert runner, desert crawler like I want to build here. So, uh, yeah, as long as it shifts well, which I think it seems to so far, but I haven’t had it out on the road to test it. But yeah, so we’re definitely going to keep that. And as you can see, there’s not really a lot of rust. There’s some surface rust on the frame, nothing real bad. There is some rust there under the seat pan. I think that happens quite a bit in these trucks, so I’ll have to cut that out, put some rust inhibitor or converter on there, and eventually cut that out and probably weld a little pan or something in there to make sure that doesn’t get any worse, make sure it can support my amper frame while I’m in the truck. And then, uh, yeah, so scoot back here. All right, scooting back just a little bit, you can see the transfer case here. I believe it’s an NP205, although I’m not 100% sure. I got to check this tag here and double check, but, uh, I think that’s going to be what it is. Believe it or not, guys, I was wrong. It’s actually a Borg Warner 1345, not a New Process 205 transfer case. Both of those transfer cases were used in this era of Bullnose Broncos, so I wasn’t sure which one it was, and I took a stab, and I was wrong. They’re both really good transfer cases. They’re both pretty similar. The Borg Warner’s got a chain drive, and the NP205’s got a gear drive. I’ll do another video about the differences in the different transfer case options that there are, but I think I’m probably going to go ahead and stick with what I’ve got. I’ll do a service on it and make sure that it runs okay. But, uh, yeah, so it’s a Borg Warner 1345. And then, uh, yeah, you can see underneath here to the back, got the famous Ford 9 inch, which I’m super excited about. It’s not an end case, though I wouldn’t expect it to be an ’82 Bronco. So, uh, but it should still do perfectly for what I want. Beef it up a little bit, put some high spline axles in there and, you know, a locker and some stuff, and we’ll be good to go there. And then, yeah, the driver’s side of the body here doesn’t look too bad. Um, so I think I’m in good shape. There’s some surface rust on the cross member and the frame and just in general, but there’s no rot through. It’s just surface stuff. So, man, got rust falling on me. Uh, but hey, you know, that’s part of the job. So, yeah, um, I’m super happy with it. I’m looking forward to digging into this thing and see what we can make out of it.

All right guys, well then, these are the twin sisters of Bullnose Garage. They’re not identical, just like my other twin girls aren’t identical, but they’re both the same vintage, and one’s an ’85 F150 and one’s an ’82 Bronco. Um, yeah, I’m super, super thrilled of them both. Can’t wait to get them both on the road and going. This one here will obviously get done first. Uh, this is one that I put the new engine in, the 408 that’s going to go in here. Uh, this one has got a lot of work yet to do. I got to do some body work and, uh, obviously work on the engine fueling system, brakes, all that stuff. The fiberglass cab’s got some issues. Some of the fiberglass is kind of getting worn down. I got to, uh, probably coat that and put a coat of paint on it and stuff. But you know what? I’m going to bring you guys along for all that stuff. Uh, you know, this whole channel, everything’s about me cutting my teeth and getting some experience on some of the stuff that I don’t really know that much about. So, uh, yeah, looking forward to getting both these girls fixed up and ready to go. And if you want to be along for the ride, make sure you like and subscribe. I really appreciate that. And like I said, I got that 408 that I’m getting ready to build that’s coming up on the channel. So if you want to see what I’m doing there, make sure you subscribe and, uh, you know, ring the bell and keep in touch with all that stuff. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, C interet ramblings, stick them below. And thanks again so much for watching, guys. We will see you next time. She’s rough around the edges, but she’s doing fine. Take her away, getting things to shine. That Bullnose Garage, she’s considered divine. Thanks again for watching. We will see you next time. Thanks again for watching. We will see you next time.