What have you done to your Tacoma today? 1st Gen Edition

In my experience, I've found that solder remains molten for 1-2 seconds so you do have a period of time where you can position the chip.

This is going to be difficult without any flux or a hot air rework gun.

 

Another reminder why I stopped carrying around my Rancher 55...just too big. Need to pick myself up a little pro Stihl with a 13" or so bar for occasions like these or the tree(s) down across the trail scenarios

 

Yea the double cab one doesn’t look as good as the rack for the second gens etc

I was hoping for something good from them

 

I have an echo cs-400 with a 18” bar that I love! Work great for my needs. Which are Camping and wheeling needs

 

Welp. That sucked. I am a little rusty at SMD soldering.

I globbed solder on some of the metal traces of IC1 and getting it off was tough. These pins and traces are so small you need a jewelers Lupe to really see them.

I’m going to go see if it still works.

 

Nope. It’s dead.

And the rest of the cluster is too.

RIP 5-Lug Cluster 1998-2018

 

Anybody have any recommendations on new headlight assemblies? I’m looking to do another retrofit and my stock housings are pretty badly UV damaged. I don’t really want to spend a ton for OEM but if aftermarket ones are pure junk then I might just bite the bullet.

 

No but send me your used sparkplugs for testing and analysis

 

With aftermarkets the beam quality sucks but if you're doing projector retrofits then you should be fine. Even though I'm not running retrofits, I still buy aftermarkets, I can't justify the cost of new OEM HLs when they'll need to replaced in so many years due to UV damage.

Only really other issue is leakage. So far I've had Eagle Eyes & TYC, neither of the housings have leaked or fogged up on me. I also have Vision brand new sitting in the garage, heard their brackets are loose & causes shaking but not for sure, I haven't tried them yet.

If you go with TYC, don't waste your money on the Capa crap like I did, they're no different than the regular ones. Depo usually makes decent aftermarket lights but I'm sure their beam quality is just as bad, but again in your case doesn't matter.

 

Thanks for the info. I’ll look at all those options. And yes, I’m not really concerned with the beam pattern because I’ll be retrofitting anyway.

I wish I could find replacement lenses for OEM but I’ve had no luck so far. I’ve used a headlight restoration kit once and it helped a little but it came back pretty fast. What’s weird is my driver side is way worse than the passenger as far as UV damage goes.

 

NP. I don't even waste money on HL restoration kits. I just put a coat of wax on the HLs everytime I wash the truck. Once they age & start hazing up, I'll then just hand polish the haze off every car wash & again wax to prolong them. Then eventually when they get the permanent yellowing from UV damage is when I replace them depending on how bad they bother me.

 

So did you swap a turd gen for a turd gen just without the bed?

 

If I had the space that you do, I would build a welding stand and practice all different welds with it with different thickness metal coupons.

 

So you've got 4 vehicles now? Two turds, best gen and a Doge?

 

Oh. Yea that makes sense. I wouldnt trust them either if i clipped them

Haha. Will do

 

Sell me the temp needle.

 

Thats actually a bad way to solder. Creates a cold joint.

You actually want to heat the two things you are combining and flow solder on it. Thats a proper solder joint.

 

Let me see if it even works.

 

I know that’s not you’re supposed to solder. I usually do SMD soldering with a hot air rework station, I just dont have one anymore. It’s an SMD Oscillator chip, so the contacts are on the underside of the chip. I don’t have the proper tools to solder those kinds of things anymore so what I did was the next best thing.

I killed the Odometer PCB anyway, some stray solder got on the pins for IC1 and shorted something out, despite my efforts.

However, the IC chip with the mileage stored on it is still intact. I’m sending it out to have the chips swapped onto a new instrument cluster.

 

Okay sounds good to me