For starters, my involvement with Denise’s Bronco started way back in 2000, shortly after her and I started seeing each other.
At the time, I was running a side hustle out of my little two car garage doing metal fab. I would build pretty much anything out of metal if someone would pay for it-metal art, gates, fences, tools, parts-whatever. But my passion was off road vehicles, and I had built or modified a number of 4×4’s, prerunners, or race vehicles.
It developed one day that Denise had this old ’74 Bronco that she had bought off her brother some years ago, but she could never keep it running and it would always overheat. So I told her I would drag it over to my house and see if I could figure out what it needed.
When I picked it up, it would barely run, and you had to blip the throttle frequently just to keep it idling, and to get the engine to spool up seemed to require a double pump of the gas pedal followed by a slight delay and then the engine would run away.
Which is exactly what happened at the first intersection I came to as I left her house-engine stumbled, stumbled, then-BAM! came on like a light switch and lit up the 33″ tires in a fairly impressive but accidental burnout through half the intersection. As the rubber began squealing I noticed the police car parked a half block away to my right, and it was immediately obvious to me that he had taken note of the old bronco doing a burnout right in front of him, so I just coasted to the shoulder of the road after clearing the intersection saving us both the embarrassment of having to be asked to pull over.
Fortunately, the officer was in a good mood, and believed my story for the accidental burnout, and let me off with a warning. It probably didn’t hurt that at the time, I was actually kinda in charge of the city traffic signal maintenance as a traffic signal tech, and he recognized me as the guy that was often up in a bucket truck working on Lake Havasu’s traffic lights. (Yeah, add that to my list of interesting work experiences-for a time I did traffic signal maintenance and installations.)
Anyway, that incident was a kinda funny and perhaps indicative start to my long running love/hate relationship with the Bronco.
The Cliffs notes for the next chapter of the Bronco’s history is: via a motor swap, I finally got the old horse running (someone had rebuilt the 302 in the Bronco when I got ahold of it-but had bored it too big, and it just would not stay cool), beat and massaged a bunch of it into functioning shape, and Denise and I took it on a bunch of different adventures over the next several years.
The Bronco was reasonably capable, reasonably reliable, and all-in-all, not a bad truck. Except it was a 1974 Bronco with a cheap Rancho 3″ suspension lift and it rode like it. Fuck, that thing would punish you for spending a long day on the trail in it. And I came from a world of long travel, plush riding pre-runners, so the ride quality was something of an insult to me.
But it was Denise who ultimately and perhaps unwittingly turned the Bronco into the long running project that it has become, when-after spending several days in it on a back country camping trip, what today you would call an overlanding trip-she declared that she was tired of getting beat up and wanted to sell the bone-jarring Bronco and perhaps build an Explorer like the one we had been camping with all week, and whose occupants were cheery and limber and happy with the ride, as opposed to the occupants of the bronco who were grumpy and sore and unhappy with the ride. (the Explorer I refer to, in case you haven’t figured it out, is what we currently call the Mud Taxi, but at that time was in full prerunner trim and I had just recently finished building it for my now brother-in-law.)
I have to say, it was at this point that I should have been elated to get rid of that old Bronco. It had been a constant pain in my ass for a number of years by that time, I seemed to constantly have to work on it, and I kinda hated it. The problem was, I somehow also kinda loved that old thing, and I somehow convinced Denise that we could rebuild it to be as good as or better than an explorer. And that I could chop it up, build a bunch of custom suspension, and glue it back together in about 6 months.
Oops.
Not only should I have let her just sell it, I’m obviously terrible at estimating how long it takes to build something like this.
In my defense, the original build idea was NOTHING even remotely as complex as it became. Somehow Project Bronco took on a life of it’s own and morphed into trying to build the absolute best vehicle I could build with as many features and functions as I could cram into it.
Which brings us to the build/design philosophy that has been Project Bronco’s roadmap.
The overarching idea was to build a vehicle that could go just about anywhere in reasonable comfort, and have the ability to get itself back home even in the event of minor mechanical failures.
And that’s the reason for the big tires, big axles, big suspension, and all the systems crammed into it. Reliable and self-reliant were the goals.
And so without further ado, I’d like to present you with Project Bronco’s fuel system.
Here is an overhead view of the twin suction side filters and twin fuel pumps that are shoehorned in between the rear suspension and the chassis. It’s a tighter fit than it looks. You can see some of the all stainless exhaust system in this picture too. Notice all the V-band clamps. I wanted it to be easy to service.
Here is a view from underneath with the floor installed.
One other thing I obviously didn’t build in this picture-the drivelines, which I had custom built to my specs by High Angle Driveline.
The fuel tank I designed and built myself, and it’s pretty special. I knew that I needed to cram all the fuel capacity I could into it, while at the same time keeping the tank out of harms way-no easy task on a vehicle with so much wheel travel and expected to traverse rough terrain regularly.
To keep the tank strong, and to help control fuel slosh without resorting to foam, the tank is made from 1/8″ thick aluminum and is carefully baffled.
Here’s a view of the bottom of the tank during it’s construction.
Here is a view from the top rear that shows the tanks tab and slot construction a bit better.
This next picture is unfortunately not very good, but it shows two important features of the rear of the tank.
First, you can see there are square holes in the sides and middle baffle of the tank-these would later become a reinforced tube that runs through the tank, which would allow the rear sway bar to go through the tank.
Second is the indentation in the rear of the tank-this allows you to get your hand between the tank and the rear bumper to get to the bumper’s hidden hitch pin.
Here is one of the two pickup tube assemblies I built that allow the pickup connection to be on top of the tank where it is protected, but allows the actual pickup point to be at the very bottom of the tank to scavenge as much fuel as possible. There wasn’t really room to do a pickup sump without reducing ground clearance, so I’m relying on the baffles and the large pre-pump filters to act as a sump/reservoir.
Fueling the Bronco isn’t really straightforward, as there were no real good spots to put a filler neck where it either wasn’t vulnerable or in the way. I finally decided to stash the filler behind the tailgate behind a rear shock.
Not the greatest picture, but if you look close here behind the shock, you can see the stainless fuel tank fill line, the back side of the filler neck, and the braided stainless vent line that goes to an external roll-over valve.
You can also see the air bump in the foreground.
If you look real closely, you can see a large round aluminum tube with big brackets-that’s an air tank for the onboard air system.
Here you can see above the transmission with the floor removed, the four stainless hard lines covered with high temp silicone/fiberglass sleeve that make up the fuel feed lines and bypass regulator return lines for the two fuel pumps.
You can also see the transmission cooler lines, and the air conditioner system from Vintage Air shoehorned in up under the dash.
Here is a shot of the near-completed engine bay.
On the passenger side of the carb, you can see the two pressure regulators, and the check valves that allow one pump/regulator or the other to run independently without using any of the other fuel lines. The two fuel systems are kept totally separate right up to this point to allow maximum reliability in case of damaged fuel system components.
I set the engine and fuel system up to be carbureted because at the time, in my opinion, fuel injection systems just were not that reliable. Whenever we finally get around to making this thing run, I will likely install one of those aftermarket injection systems that are designed to replace a carb, as they seem to have gotten much more reliable and just over all better over the last several years.
You can see a lot of the other systems in this picture too.
The beginnings of the dual ignition system with a dual pickup distributor.
The air conditioning condenser and lines and dryer.
The two huge oil coolers and fans for the engine and transmission.
The brake master cylinders, and next to them, the power steering reservoir.
Here is the fuel tank installed-even though you can barely see the fuel tank, as it is completely covered by its 1/4″ thick aluminum skid plate protector.
You can see the two bolts and straps (with red tape on them) that secure the tank in place.
And if you look close, you can see the large machined steel ring that is the mounting flange for the cantilever arms pivot point. The cantilevers pivot on Dana 44 hub snouts so I could use off the shelf parts like bearings and seals. But more importantly, the Dana 44 snouts are hollow, and will allow me to use the cantilever arms as sway bar links too, and now you know why there is a tube going through the fuel tank.
Here is another look at the skid plate/fuel tank that show the recess for accessing the hitch pin in the rear bumper.
Anyway, there’s the fuel system, and a bit more, of Project Bronco.