Henry Culvyhouse: My dad's Bronco II

Mar. 31—Inwood, W.Va.

Back in the late '90s, my dad bought a fire-engine red Ford Bronco II from a used car lot.

He'd just bought an Apache pop up camper — he'd done a test run pulling it with my mom's sedan and about blew the motor driving it down to Lake Sherando, roughly 40 miles away.

So he bought this 1989 Bronco II.

Don't get it confused with the O.J. 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 pretty much pull anything off a Ranger from that year and bolt it onto the Bronco.

Now this SUV wasn't a like the glorified station wagons you see today. This thing was a truck. As the SUV turned into soccer-mom mobiles, my dad always made it a point to say "they made them gnarly back then."

And boy they did. It was a two door, so you had to put down the passenger seat to squeeze past. The seats were vinyl with dimples, so in the summer time when you wore shorts your thighs would look like craters on the moon. The AC worked sometimes, but the only reliable form of air was what my dad called "2/55" — two windows down going 55 mph.

In the back seat, where I sat — no seat belt, dodging my father's cigarette ashes — the windows did not roll down, so it was effectively a greenhouse. Many a trip, I felt woozy with heat.

Four-wheel drive wasn't a knob you turned on the dash board. There was a separate stick shift for that in the floor. Sucker was stiff, so it would take a try or two, but it would go in.

However, my dad did have automatic locking wheel hubs for 4-wheel drive. He'd tell me to hop out at a light and I'd turn this dial on the hubs to lock them in.

In the trunk area, he had apple boxes from one of the orchards. That's where he put the groceries to keep them from sliding around.

By God, we'd go everywhere in that thing. Our first ever vacation I remember, we went to Cherokee Country down in North Carolina pulling along the camper in that thing. I remember laying down in the back seat, wrapped up in a Batman blanket poking my head up and looking at the mist of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

It could be argued my daddy was a cheap man, but if you asked him, he was frugal. After getting robbed one too many times at the mechanic's shops, he made it a mission to teach himself how to work on cars.

So when the Bronco started tapping whenever he drove it above 55 mph, he got himself an engine hoist and pulled the engine out and spent two months rebuilding it.

Going down into the basement, he had that sucker stripped apart — crankshaft over here, a head over there.

I was too little to really help, but he did let me stand around and fetch him tools the Saturday he dropped the engine back in.

Through my dad's cussing and fussing and busted knuckles, I got hooked on working on cars. It wasn't long — I was probably about 10 — that my dad had me change the oil on the Bronco.

I screwed up — I over tightened the oil filter, breaking the seal and causing oil to flow out down the driveway. To my surprise, my dad wasn't pissed at all — he chalked it up to a learning experience.

When the brake pads needed changed, my dad had me right beside him changing them. He did the driver's side to show me, then he placed the ratchet in my hand with a pipe for leverage and had me change out the passenger side.

As the truck aged, it became harder and harder to find parts. Just about every week, my dad would buy the Valley Trader, the local pre-Internet Craigslist, and would scour for parts.

So when the clutch went out, he picked up a transmission out of the Valley Trader, too, so we could change it all out in one go.

It was the summer — my dad was a substitute teacher — so he had all day, everyday to work on it. and I was right there beside him, crawled up underneath. Heck, I got my first mechanic related injury that time — when we took it off the stands to see if it would run, I pinched my finger on the stand, taking a chunk off the tip and bled like a stuck pig.

As the truck approached 300,000 miles, it came time for another engine rebuild. As a shop teacher of mine once said, my dad was in "a war of time and money over common sense." He found a 1988 Bronco II in the Valley Trader for $500.

That Bronco was regulated to farm use. It ran fine, they were just fixing to get it off their hands. So we piled in our Bronco, drove down to Woodstock, Virginia, and he drove it back. When he parked it in our driveway, that's where it stayed for nearly a decade.

We dubbed it "The Junker" — that truck became our Napa Auto Parts.

First course of business was swapping out seats — the Junker had the Eddie Bauer, which were suede and smooth. That only took an afternoon.

Then came the engine swap — we had that swapped out in a day or two.

When I was 16, I pulled the transmission out myself and sold it in the Valley Trader. A year or two later, me and the strongest man in the county towed The Junker to a scrap yard and made a cool $400 off it.

When it came time for me to drive, I was gifted the family sedan, a 1997 Ford Taurus called "The Green Machine." The Bronco II had been rode hard and put up wet — she had 450,000 on the body and frame at that point.

I wanted so badly to drive it, so I took some money I had squirreled up and my dad threw in where I was short and I went about my first engine rebuild.

I was 16-17 at the time — my dad told me right off the bat his job was to "advise and consult." He made me read an old mechanic shop text book he'd bought years ago when he did his first rebuild. He made me read the Chilton's guide on the Bronco II/Ranger.

Then we pulled it out, put it on an engine stand and as I had time, I worked on it.

It took me a summer and a crate of detergent to wipe down the parts. Then we had to hurry up and wait for the machine shop to redo the heads, clean up the block and polish the crank shaft.

Little-by-little, I pieced it back together, spending free afternoons after school or work hunched over the engine, bolting her together.

The day came to turn it over. After spraying a little starting fluid, I cranked it up.

The whole truck shook and the engine sounded like a thousand pennies smacking around inside a dryer.

My dad yelled, "Shut it off!"

"What the hell was that?" I asked.

"I don't know, but something's bad wrong," he said. "Did you put oil in it?"

I did put oil in it — did it make down into the crankcase? I pulled the oil plug and metal shavings poured out.

"That's not good," I said.

"You must've missed something," he said.

I went rooting around in the basement, seeing what part I missed.

On the bench were small white boxes, with a label on them reading "Main Bearings."

For the mechanically inclined out there, you know damn well that's a catastrophe. For the layman, it's quite simple — they're bearings that allow the crankshaft to turn. Without them, it's metal-on-metal, which means you'll have a seized up engine.

At roughly 450,000 miles on the frame and body, the Bronco II — its fire engine red paint peeling, its gloss long since faded, its Eddie Bauer seats stained and musty — was dead.

The strongest man in the county had some cousins that could use it for parts — we sold it for a cool $800 and called it quits.

They came by and loaded it up onto a trailer while I was at work. Maybe it was best that way.

Even though I killed the Bronco II, a piece of it still lives on inside me — thanks to it, I know you can take apart just about any late model Ford with a 10mm, a 13mm and a 15mm socket.

Every time I change a wheel bearing, I think about my dad covered in grease fighting with it in the gravel. Every time I change the oil, I make sure to turn the filter snug, but not tight.

It taught me to take my time, to cross my I's and dot my T's.

And every time I see a Bronco II on the road — which isn't often, even in this zip code — I can't help but to smile.