Custom Ford Bronco Has the Heart and Bones of an F-250
Determined Bronco owner splices two frames together to form his vehicle’s backbone and gives it a 7.3-liter Power Stroke diesel heart.
As long as there have been automobiles, there have been engine swaps. Whether it’s because the old one blew out or someone just wants more power, people have been yanking engines out of vehicles and replacing them with other ones for more than a century. The gentleman who owns the custom Ford Bronco shown in this YouTube video from WFO Concepts gave it the heart of a diesel truck, but he did so much more than just that.
This 1996 Bronco XLT belongs to a man named Chris. He wanted to give his rig the power of a 7.3-liter Power Stroke diesel, but doing that in the traditional way would’ve required him to disconnect everything and yank the mechanical heart out of a 1996 F-250 donor truck. Chris went another way. He tells WFO Concepts’ Trevor Huiskens, “It was quite the project. We had to actually cut an F-250 in half and splice the frame together.” That way the Power Stroke and everything immediately around it, including its motor mounts, stayed how it came from the factory.
Of course, getting that F-250 engine to work with the Bronco’s electronics required some custom work. Chris says, “We had to re-pin the whole [wiring] harness … from the Power Stroke harness to the Bronco harness.” The operation was a success because everything, including the power windows and locks and rear window defroster, works as it should.
Chris went beyond that and installed the gauge cluster from the F-250 in the Bronco’s dashboard, too. He even changed his Bronco’s gearbox. He can now put the 7.3’s torque down through a 2002 ZF six-speed manual transmission.
Initially, all of that diesel grunt did a number on the Bronco’s rear end. According to Chris, “It basically snapped the old leaf springs and snapped the driveline when I tried to do a burnout the first time.” As it sits now, Chris’s Bronco has the rear axle from a 2009 F-250 reinforced by torque arms to keep it from twisting under power. Up front, there’s a Dana 60 and a set of radius arms.
Chris puts all of those reinforcements to the test when he turns onto a busy road and drops the hammer. He launches forward on a wave of torque, leaving a large puff of black smoke in his wake. This time, nothing breaks. Everything works together to send Chris down the road in a hurry.
We would’ve been impressed if Chris had done what a lot of people do with Ford project vehicles and dropped a Coyote 5.0 into it, but we’re glad he went this route. It does bring up a question, though: What happened to the back end of that F-250 he sawed in half?
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