Matt's 2013 slow build

A friend/local member works at Toyota in NoVa and is gonna be mounting/balancing my tires for me tomorrow after work! $60 for all four

 

Scraped the living hell out of my front passenger fender the other day. About a 1.5ft long scratch all the way down to the plastic. too bad bushwacker flares are so expensive. Maybe I'll see if I can score a cheap set somewhere and hit them with some bedliner..

 

ALRIGHT, so, long needed update. Been super busy lately.

Last week (Sunday and Monday) I met up with Skygear at his place in NoVa and got my lift installed. After fighting with NTB to have the front struts and coil springs assembled, I ended up renting (buying) a spring compressor from Advance Auto. The guy at NTB said the spring was too long, so when it was compressed it curved and contacted the side of the strut.. I looked at it with Skygear for a few minutes and we noticed that the guy had the bottom cup/seat upside down

Anyways, we got the front driver's side done in about an hour and a half. Got the front passenger side down in about an hour. When reassembling the passenger side though, disaster struck in the form of stripped bolts. The two bolts on either side of the LCA ball joint got stripped and wouldn't go in. After talking to another local member who works at a dealership, we learned that those two bolts are an M16-1.25 which is a specialty bolt only made by Toyota, and they are only available to Toyota dealerships when hand released by Toyota of America. Eventually ended up using a dremel to re-cut the threads on the bolt and got it all back together. Rear lift took about two hours total on Monday night.

5100's on all 4 corners, OME 885x coils, and Wheeler's HD 3-Leaf progressive AAL. Front went from roughly 20.5" hub-to-fender up front to 23", and roughly 23 to 24.4" in the back.

Pictures! (It was dark most of the time so I dont have any from the install)













Alignment Specs




Today after work I got around to putting some stickers on! Finally repping TW, and started my sticker collection on the inside of my toolbox lid And you can't even tell that I tore off the "Ta" from the TW sticker by accident..

 

trucks looking good

 

Thanks Brian!

 

Whats with the Maryland Crab stickers? I see them everywhere

 

haha well, not trying to be a hipster, but I bought one when I was at the beach last February. Sometime over the summer though it became like "the thing" so now everyone and their mom has one and I just look like a tool

 

not me .me no like crabs

 

lame. I only like the kind from the ocean... if you know what I mean.

 

I wouldn't say you're a tool. I thought about getting one myself

I love shell fish

 

haha well I mean, I like to think I'm not

and me too dude. I'll eat pretty much any seafood minus oysters. Unless they're super fried.

 

Cleaned up my initial post some.. There was a lot of unnecessary stuff in there haha flows better now.

I seriously need some better pictures though.

 

Here you go Mason.. more of an updated picture. Crappy iphone quality, but it'll work for now. lol and updated my signature.

 

Next time, tap the screen in a darker area on the image and it will illuminate that area by changing the focus

I would bet i have over 2500 pictures of my truck.....

 

I did, but then it just made the sky straight white and washed out the background.. lol I need to just start carrying my actual camera with me.





Other news: I'm seriously thinking about trying to offload my roll-up tonneau to get a softopper. The more I think about it, the more I think I'd love one. The only issue would be access to my tool chest. I know the sides are roll-up, but I don't know how much of a hassle it would be to unbutton and roll it up multiple times a day to get stuff out for work.

 

Good looking truck! How are you liking the 5100s? I was thinking of getting a set of the RCD versions for the rear of my truck.

 

Thanks man! I love them. They're a huge step up from the stock TRD suspension. The new RCD's look pretty awesome haha if I had a few more hundred and hadn't just installed 5100's I would probably be waiting for them. I really like the pairing of the 5100 with the OME 885x coil springs. I can hit speed bumps around 40ish and not really even feel it. haha

 

The ones I am looking at are $150 I love the OME rear shocks I have but they limit the amount of rear travel and these are for a 4 inch lift so they won't limit travel as much.

 

Ahhh, nvm then. haha I thought you were talking about these:

http://www.tacomaworld.com/forum/suspension/349136-new-bilstein-coilovers.html

But yea, I probably could use longer rear shocks so that may be happening at some point in the future, but I don't really offroad a whole lot so I'm not too worried about not having a ton of down travel in the rear. My AAL gave me about a 1.5" lift and the normal 5100's that I have are 2" of travel so it's not a whole ton, but enough that I'm not going to blow a shock on normal driving.

You have full Deaver packs right? My only concern with going to those would be if the shock body is too long for the leaf pack and you wouldn't have any up travel. I don't know if that's a real concern or not though.. I haven't really looked into any of it haha