Long Travel BS Thread

None.. I has tundy axle

 

Auto transmission with a shift kit is pretty nice in the gen 1 tacoma!!! Better yet is this nifty little switch on our center console that we have now. Put the gate shifter in drive and it's just like every other tacoma out there. Flip the switch to the other position though and it kills the computer control over the transmission and puts 100% of the shifting into our hands and at the flip of a switch our truck now has full manual valve body type action and the shifts are INSTANT instead of having that slight delay that they have when you downshift it with the shifter. Such a badass improvement!!!

Oh, and that power steering rack that everyone hates... Yeah, time will tell but I made some pretty legit mods to our stock one that hopefully will make that a thing of the past.

Game on in Parker in 2 weeks!

 

Want to upgrade my steering rack? I have a fairly new steering rack that I would like to survive.

 

Are these top secret race designs or can we get some more info on both! Both of these are on my list of need to do!!!

 

Is this possible in a 2nd Gen tacoma?

 

Anyone know of any helpful links or info on tuning an aem fic-6 to our 3.4L?

 

I don't know enough about the 2nd gen setup to say to be quite honest with you.

My 1st hand experience with the rack on the gen 1 so far has been a weak link in the mounting. I've seen pictures of them split in half in the center where the two halves pressed together. We've not had a complete failure yet as I do truly believe our geometry is a big help in keeping the bad juju minimal but I have experienced where it has started to separate. So I started looking at the mounting and the rack itself... This isn't proven by anymeans and like I said, time will tell but on our truck. The middle set of tabs with the vertical bolt thru them have cracked and almost completely ripped off the frame. I fixed those and plated them up with some extra gusseting. Nothing magical there. The passenger side mount though literally is just a clamping setup and in my mind with enough force and pressure inside the rack I could see why it would allow for it to separate in the center press fit point. The driver's half is physically bolted solid and can only move whatever the bushings will allow for while the passenger side is lame and could actually slide around with enough force and I believe that's what we were experiencing in our case. So... I pulled the rack off and tore it apart to see what's inside it and what would be damaged if I actually welded to the rack housing. The rack comes apart easy, nothing scary or crazy involve and once you have it apart you can see where the two internal seals are, one near the middle and one on the far outer passenger side. That passenger half also is steel unlike the drivers side which is a cast aluminum. So what I've done to ours is I simply welded a 4th mounting setup on that passenger half of the rack so it's now also solid bolted to the chassis. It can't separate anymore without something literally ripping off the frame. I beefed up all the chassis mounts and I also machined delron bushings rather then poly for the drivers half. I'm still using the passenger side clamp and we're running the energy poly piece in there but I now have an additional mounting point on that side and our rack at this point is truly solid mounted to the chassis. This keeps the rack flex and movements minimal, more support to the rack body itself and this extra set of mounts makes it impossible to separate like I said unless something literally rips off the fame.

Time will tell but the failure that our rack was working it's way towards in my mind is a lack of mounting strength of the rack to the chassis and not a lack of strength in the rack itself. We'll see, I only have maybe 30 miles of testing on it this past weekend but I'm expecting this race in 2 weeks to be pretty brutal so we'll see how it looks when we cross the finish line. "If" this holds up and things are looking good in another 2000 miles or whatever of hard abuse I'll post up pictures and more info of exactly what I did. I'm not a top secret type, if something I've done can help others by copying, more power to you... We're not making a living racing, it's for fun and this isn't TT status crap so I'm not worried.

If someone truly wants pictures of what I've done right now at this point I'll send them to you but like I said, it's not proven yet. My gut feeling is it's definitely an improvement though for the failure our rack was working it's way towards, I don't see how this change can't be a fix for in all honesty. Now granted, this may just lead us to learn what the next weak link is but so far, our first weak link was the rack itself pulling apart at the seam in the middle...





Now on the transmission... We're running the stock AW340E in the '04 V6 Tacoma Prerunner series truck. The truck had roughly 120K on the odo when we went full race build on it. At this point in time we've got roughly 2000 miles of race level abuse on the transmission. We weren't sure how it would hold up. We're running a cooler off a fullsize chevy truck with a tow package out of a junkyard. I'm talking a $10 cooler, not a HUGE mega badass setup with a fan. Just a simple cooler. I've NEVER seen the temp go over 215 degrees. We also are not running anything exotic oil wise in it. At V2R we had some trans issues that I thought were possibly internal so we pulled the trans and had it rebuilt. The 1st-2nd clutch pack looked brand new along with the 3rd-OD clutch packs. I"m talking you could still read the part numbers on the friction discs. Most of my shifting is the 3-2 clutch pack and even it looked great, it had some wear but nothing abnormal and if it was a street duty/play truck we'd have just left them in it. We replaced just cause though. The band looked brand new too! Literally everthing looked brand new. Since it was apart we put in a shift kit from transgo. I can say after my test session this past weekend with it, that's a pretty nice upgrade for $100 in parts. There's 3 levels of shift aggressiveness with that kit and we went with the middle one, next time the trans is out I may go to the most aggressive though.

The issue we were having with the trans at V2R though ended up not being internal but ended up being a wiring short in the Neutral safety switch so I got that fixed and the trans is back to 100% normal. A while back though, talking with my uncle who's a pretty legit transmission guru he mentioned that we could bypass the computer control of the transmission shifts and control the solenoids with switches. That always seemed like a cool idea to me. So I looked into it more and I found a kit online for $150 that is a direct bolt in for the winters/art carr shifter that we run. This kit bolts right into the inside of the shifters and is a simply 3 wire hookup, one to power, and one to each solenoid. Basically this allows the physical shifter to actually control the solenoids and basically makes it an electrically controlled manual shift body type setup. My uncle though took it a step further and set ours up so that if we ever have a switch failure inside the shifter or a wiring issue we can simply switch back to the stock computer controlled setup and it's like normal driving but with a shift kit in the trans. So far, it's BADASS!!!!!

My uncle originally was going to set up all the switches himself for us but then I found this premade kit and the price is worth it, direct bolt in if you already have the winters/art carr shifter, VERY high quality. Only complaint was the instructions were a little rough but once you figure out what the kit is doing, it kinda just falls into place and is pretty obvious. It's really a pretty slick setup and I'll give the guy that developed it a lot of credit, it's an impressive design that he came up with...

http://radesignsproducts.com/Winters_Shifter_Kits.php

BTW, the way these transmissions work, when the computer shifts gears, it doesn't use the full clutch pack. When you actually make the shifts yourself with the shifter it uses the full clutch pack and is actually better on the clutch packs so converting to the full manual or even running your truck as if it was full manual and making your shifts by hand before the computer decides it's time to shift is actually easier on your clutches. I honestly never knew that and always thought it was the opposite. When I saw our 3-2 clutch packs though it was interesting cause they physically showed wear that totally supported what my uncle explained in regards to that.

 

BTW, if you want to add that 4th mounting point to the rack, get your hands on the factory rebuild instructions for the rack, it's very simple. I could actually probably scan and email them to you if you wanted them and can't find them yourself. Reason to do this though is so you can see first hand where the two seals are. Reason being, when you weld the new mounting tabs on you obviously don't want to melt the hell out of those internal seals. I put our tabs centered between them, welded slow and used a wet sponge to keep the heat transfer across the rack as minimal as possible. You could replace the seals yourself if you did damage them in the process but why not just try to prevent that in the first place...

 

Thank you!!

 

Wow that was long

 

Too many words? I know people don't like reading in 2015 anymore so here's your version...



I added a 4th mount to the steering rack.


I also put some switch things in our shifter and now I can shift the transmission to any gear at any time from any speed and it won't ever shift unless I tell it to.

 

so much better hahaha

 

Ok now explain exactly what you did......again

 

So much Toyota wisdom in this. Thanks for taking the time to write that out.

 

Alright long travel gents, I have a dilemma. I'm swapping out my rear axle in my 4runner and need help setting my pinion angle at ride height. In my old axle I had the pinion pointed directly at the transfer case, mind you it's only has one u joint at each end. Now I get what I feel is excessive rear end lift in acceleration. Like the whole back of the truck lifts 3 to 4 inches. Is this due to axle wrap?.
My set up is
50t leaf pack set at 52.5 mount to mount
12 inch total chaos shackles

Any help would be appreciated I am stumped. I'm tempted to go back to spring over axle lol

 

I think you want the axle down a little bit but I don't remember...Jason knows

 

Pretty sure 3* down to compensate typically

 

Thats with a double cardin joint.

not straight u joints.

 

I'm so tired of knocking alignment out of spec. I wheel the truck but it's not like I'm out there beating the piss out of it. I have gusseted damn near everything, including the TC replacement cams / tabs, double sheered the UCA bolt (TC's kit), and the spindles are gusseted.

Truck is lacking return to center after this weekend's offroading trip.

I can't get chamber and caster set together. I have to give one up for the other. Right now I don't have much caster in exchange for being close on chamber (-0.4 Chamber, 1.0 of caster on one side and 1.9 on the other if I remember right).

Should I be trading chamber for more caster to help out the handling?

If toe has been thrown off by the LCAs shifting in the tabs, would toe out of whack result in losing return to center?

 

Have you considered solid mounting the lowers?