Crazy Leak from the Rear end overnight

Unless you’re driving around in low range my new Tacoma didn’t have enough power to cause any problems unfortunately lol , it felt underpowered and doggy the last thing I felt like it needs is something to control high performance problems like axle wrap and wheel hop. Also understeer , oversteer none of those terms seem to fit the 4x4 Tacoma.

 

i would cut the bracket off, fix the hole, draw up a new bracket that has much more weld surface area and you should be good. i have a similar setup on my fj40 as wheel hop sucked

 

that's the re-do plan eventually but we already got this all fixed for now. the axle housing is patched up all good as new. but i'll tell you i'm seriously missing the bar just for the driving.

 

yea, i hear you on that, on my FJ with a large v8 and 37" tires the wheel hop when doing stop light burnouts was crazy. a nice beefy bar with 1.5" rod ends fixed that lol.

 

my guys want to do a full gusseted wrap around bracket solution, but their new shop isn't outfitted for fab work yet, and I'm not confident it will happen in my timeframe. I'm looking for a maker with skills & tools local to me up do it, but finding that situation isn't so straightforward. in the meantime I'm just focusing on the exhaust redo.

 

where are you located? lots of fab shops all over the place. offroad shops usually can do a good job.

 

I'm in DFW. i try not to gamble so I'm always looking for a proper referral. anyone can fab. having the knowledge about our hardware to do it right is the trick.

 

An old FJ with leaf springs and a big V-8 would need some traction bars. A underpowered 6 cylinder Tacoma no so much.

 

not true, i can gun it from a light in my heavy taco and you can see some bad axle wrap. I really notice it on dunes.

 

truth. i can literally hop my axle whenever and just about wherever i want. i drive with that in mind continually, and that was a zero issue when i had my trac bar on. it's all about how you setup your vehicle, and mine is setup for on road handling, so a little throttle gets me quite a bit of traction challenge. i like the challenge but i prefer the traction, so I'm looking to get it back with some version of a trac bar again someday.

 

Thanks for linking this to me. I had this fear when I saw the design of the budbuilt bar. I'm definitely planning on going a totally different direction with mine. My machine shop build out is about 4 months past my original time frame. I think in the next couple months I'll actually be able to start making parts.

 

loop me in!

btw it's been on the table with my shop, Tandem in Ft Worth, to do this right with a custom gusseted bracket solution. like mentioned, the bar is totally good if mounted right. i haven't committed to that yet since I've got a couple other things to do before that. but for now that's my plan maybe later this year.

 

Do you still have this? Would you recommend it knowing that the bracket needs to be beefed up or start from scratch?

 

i do not, i sold it to a TW member.

i strongly do not recommend it on a stock axle housing. and if you were bold enough to use the bar, which isn't totally awful in itself, then you absolutely will need to custom fab a proper solution for mounting at the rear. the design is terrible unless you rework it significantly.

i think i mentioned, i did like it for the 48 hours or whatever it was when it worked.

 

That looks like the same as my rear sway bar with identical brackets except mine is made by Hellwig USA. I noticed in the pictures you installed your brackets on the inside (closer to diff) of the axle housing where the welds are and not on the outside of that protruding line of the axle housing. I installed mine on the outside (towards wheel) where the red line is, please view the picture below. I've put on 15,000 miles since the install with zero issues, how long did you have the rear sway bar installed before this happened?



EDIT: Nevermind, your issue was caused by the weld-on Budbuilt bar mount and not the rear sway bar so please disregard my post.