Or does everyone's Bronco have a hodgepodge of metric and SAE nuts/bolts?

I'm swapping the tranny and it's freakin' madness. The transfer case skid plate uses 1/2" nuts on bolts with 10mm heads. Am I the victim of the PO's handiwork or is that normal for a Bronco? Very irritating when you leave the metric tools at home...

 

I wanna say thats normal. i hate it as well.

 

In my shade tree experience that's pretty normal for any domestic built in the last 20 years. All of the Fords, Chevys and Dodges I've worked on required endless socket and wrench swapping to get work done. It seems that most of the heavy assemblies like body and suspension are standard while the lighter things like transmission, accessories and electrical are metric.

When I tear into something it seems like I start with standard as things get disassembled, switch to metric to do the work and then back to standard as things go back together. What's a real pain is when some fastener is either rusted, worn or just shoddily built and you get to decide on your own what size it was supposed to be. On the upside, though, if you round something off sometimes the other system will offer a half size to get you back in the game.

IIRC GM announced that they were going 100% metric RSN and hoped to save money by doing so. Until now whichever engineering group that did the design work got to decide which system to use. Some systems got designed in house, some where out-sourced and some where bought off the shelf. Put all those things together in one vehicle and you get the witches brew you see now.

A 'free' POC 1985 Camry someone gave my wife was 100% metric, but that didn't really ease the pain of working on it.

Calvin

 

not mine, I just pulled the body off a 78 bronco and swapped a transmission and it seemed like every bolt was 9/16, 1/2 or 7/16.

 

Mine is a melting pot of metric and standard stuff. Fortunately, I have just about two complete sets of tools, so I don't have to go far.