Jake’s Taco build and other B.S.

Awesome. I got the same bike and same color. Absolutely love it ! Was a warranty replacement for my 2014 Bronson

 

Holy shite. I pay a bit less than that for my Taco, wife’s Bimmer X4M, and my Cayman combined. We’re not 32 anymore so there’s that though.

 

Hard wearing? Nothing beats cement! How can white paint be harder than cement?

 

Looks like you are near my hood! If you see another cement ORDCSB I’ll wave at you! Mine is stock on stock looking. Just a set of BFG KM3’s. I commute from the Dublin, Powers area to Pueblo for work so I need mileage. Also wanted to get a manual, I can easily do my own maint, drop and fill. Nice truck! Maybe I’ll see you around! I have no shell so I’ll look out for you!

 

2020 tacoma (before this Mazda 3 2.5L), wife's '15 camry hybrid. Rhode island. We pay about 2400/year (roughly 200/mo) for the two vehicles and the two of us. We're mid 20s, but I think being married helps too.

 

Welcome to the squeaky leaf club! It's tons of fun! Pressure wash the leaf packs well and apply something like fluid film regularly, and you might want to look into at least changing out the front leaf bolts for a greaseable bolt. That helped me with my squeaks.

 

Thanks for the tips, I gotta try that fluid film.

 

Yeah man I’ll keep my eyes open as well. I’m just up the road off woodmen. I get the stock thing, was pulling terrible MPGs across most of the country on the new 34s haha. Kansas with a head win was a solid 10.

 

Also you may want to look into greasable shackle pins/bolts and bushings for your leafs. That's the route I'm going to follow to fix this problem instead of band-aiding it.

 

Honestly they don’t squeak much at all. I just put about 5,500 miles on them and they sag a bit more than when first installed but they’re pretty quiet. What I need to figure out is the harsh bang when the front tires drop to full droop quickly. It’s like something’s loose but I’ve checked all the bolts. Maybe it’s just the UCAs hitting max articulation and the ball joints maxing out? It feels brutal though. I just got back to the house from our road trip but I should be able to mess around with the truck today and try to figure it out.

 

First off, I support your decision to make the switch from the Raptor. There are definitely a lot of pros and cons with them though. I do a majority of my wheeling trips with a raptor guy (He's had gen1 and currently has gen2). The main issues with the truck are how wide it is for some real trail exploring. I would ended up pre-running some of the trails to make sure he could fit. So all in all, he would make it to the trail head faster than me but I would make it to the trail end faster. Another thing I like about the Tacoma is that you can build the truck up how YOU want and put the money where YOU want it to be, it's such a great platform. I'm really excited to see how trial and error goes on the Magnuson SC.

Man the truck looks great! I really like the direction you are heading with it too. I was deciding between White, Cement, and Black when picking my color and went for black... Man it looks great, but I have so many scratches now that I'm just planning on getting the whole thing covered in variations of Line-X Ultra and different textures of normal Line-X.

Have you thought about getting sliders for the truck? That breakover looks a little scary on the DCLB.

 

I would recommend looking into a wrap before applying Line-X to the entire exterior. Line-X will lower the resale value of your Tacoma.

 

Now that's exactly what I should have done from the get go honestly... Now I have irreversible damage to my paint... I can't imagine Line-X would make my resell any lower than it already is. I plan on keeping this thing forever anyways.

I've seen the Line-X done correctly on a handful of vehicles and I believe when done correctly it should bring the value up to some buyers. Maybe I'll end up at SEMA . If I did get a wrap though it would likely be matte black with dark blue topo lines.. because overland. haha

But hey, I bought this thing to get out and have fun and I'll be damned if I let some scratches keep me from it.

 

I need some info on said properly done Line-X. Paint and wraps won't put up with the punishment I dish on my truck lol

 

Okay, so when I bring up the Line-X job on my truck to people their minds instantly go to the generic field of "Bed Liners" and that's just such a wide array of quality and looks that it needs more clarification. For example I've realized that it's important to point out which brand you pick, texture choice, shop quality, "aesthetics" (that's in quotes because it's opinion based), and how much are you willing to spend when you dive deeper in the conversation. These are the main variables that contribute to the final result.

Brand: I am sticking with Line-X as they have proven to be the best in long term wear and tear on their liner as well as having the widest variations in colors and textures.

Texture Choice: I will be going with the smoothest texture available on the market for the general body of the truck, a medium texture on the fender flairs/mirrors/iKamper, and coarse texture on the bumpers and sliders.

Shop Quality: I haven't located the exact shop I will want to use, but it will be selected through a process of elimination as follows. The initial list will be provided by Line-X's website here. I have "clicked" the show more button until the furthest location shows 250 miles. This should give you a fair amount to sift through.

Process of elimination:

1) From the list pick the ones that have the largest list of services. As this should show they are very active in the Line-X community and likely have greater experience.
2) Look up the reviews of each location using google maps for insight into their customer service.
3) Call and speak with each of the remaining shops. Ask how many full vehicle applications they do in a month and how many they think they do in a year. When they answer these questions a smaller shop will have a hard time giving you a number of jobs per month as their number may be less than 1 while a larger shop would likely answer faster since it might be 2 or more. Then when asking for yearly numbers a smaller shop will answer faster than a larger shop as the larger shop may have a difficult time counting that high in a short amount of time.
4) Lastly compare these numbers, reactions, and general vibe you get from the shops.​

Ideally this process will put you with a solid shop that will get it right the first time and pay attention to the details.
​

"Aesthetics": This is really up to your personal interpretation, but lets be honest putting in a little effort here will make a huge difference in the end result. In a practical sense I would see this as the contrast between "painting a picture" with one color and medium and "painting a picture" with more than one color and one than more texture.

Cost: You can see these jobs range from 1k to 9k. As you can imagine spending 9x more on the "same" job will have a drastic difference on your final product and allow for access to better quality parts and more time to pay attention to the details.

Here are some photo examples from worst to best: (Sorry you have to click all the links back to back, I just don't want to hijack this thread anymore than I already am )

Worst (1--2--3--4--5--6) Best

Note on #3 you see a similar texture to RhinoLiner, which looks like a bunch of crunched up trashbags imo..
Note on #5 this is the first truck I actually got to see Line-X ultra on. It's texture seems perfect for body panels. It also seems much easier to clean. Video here
​

 

The front I can't speak for, Mine did it when the lift was new but after about 10k miles I haven't heard anything. The leafs, Mine were fine for around 20k miles (1 year), and now at around 25k they are S Q U E A K Y. Come to find out that with polyurethane bushings you need to grease/clean the pins every 30k-50k miles. Or like I'm going to do when it warms up is buy grease-able bushings and grease-able pins. I was wrong blaming just the leafs, but they don't help!

 

I believe we have similar setups (don’t remember exactly what you’ve got). I’m on Kings (extended travel) with Dakars in the rear. When I leveled the truck with that setup, I got a pop on droop too. I had to lower the Kings and added a 1/4” Headstrong spacer to keep it level. That mostly got rid of the pop. I may try a 1/2” spacer eventually to see if that helps even more.

 

I don’t miss the raptor too awful much although it was a pretty quick truck compared to the taco haha. Will definitely be grabbing some sliders in the future. Also probably bumpers and maybe even one of those Magnuson super chargers if I can convince the wife. Fingers crossed

 

So I just noticed this weekend they are starting to squeak. It’s very quiet but I believe it’s gonna get worse quickly. Time to start looking into some grease-able pins and bushings I guess.

 

Thanks for the tip, I am running extended King’s and Dakar’s as well. I’ve been under there a bunch trying to figure out what the hell the pop is. I’ll order up some spacers and give it a try. I would love to fix that annoying pop.