Spiker Engineering High lift hood struts for the 3rd Gen Tacoma

Just finished installing mine, went with 6" clearance!



Stock prop height


So nice and easy to lift the hood now, you can easily unlatch and lift with one hand

 

Thanks @Toms 17 , I'm sure you'll appreciate the additional hood height .

 

Very nice @Jukehz , and thanks for the pictures. Enjoy the easy hood opening!

 

I went for the extra 6 inches as well. If I want lower use the prop rod.

 

So much wrong there.

 

Late on posting my results, VERRY HAPPY WITH SPIKER ENG, AND THE STRUTS!!! I went with the extra 5" of lift, install was a breeze. so much easier to open that heavy ass sport hood. thank you Spiker! Ski

 

Thanks to @Toms 17 , here is a nice side by side comparison between struts that lift the hood to prop-rod height, and the Spiker high lift struts .

 

@SpikerEng these struts are such an awesome improvement. Well done
Cheers

 

This mod is a no-brainer for anyone. It's very easy to do and the extra clearance along with ease of opening are well worth the cost.

 

With the wet Washington weather, and now the C-19 "stay at home" order, I finally got mine installed. Straightforward and pretty easy installation. I did about a 5-5.5 inch extra lift. Very smooth open and close. Using a nice new drill bit totally helped drill clean holes for the pop rivets. Totally worth it to install these struts!

 

Nicely done! 5-6" extra lift seems like the sweet spot for these trucks, except where ditch lights may be the limiting factor.

 

So price has already jumped from $88 to $95?

 

I did the install yesterday. Either my rivet gun sucks, I was doing something wrong, or those rivets are a bitch to cut. I had to bend and use wire cutters for half of them and otherwise squeezed the everlasting hell out of the gun to get that satisfying pop for the rest. The brackets are 95% stable so I'm fine. Just a sloppy job on my part. I'm assuming it was a combination of me doing something wrong and my gun sucking.

Great product, though. Good instructions, shiny parts. Got about 5.5" of additional clearance.

 

Did you remember to put the correct sized tip on your rivet gun? If not, that was probably the problem...not that I have any personal experience with this issue.....

 

Unfortunately yes, at least for now. This COVID thing has put a squeeze on my regular supplier and I had to go to a more expensive one. I'm passing along only some of the extra cost, and absorbing the rest. Hopefully it'll be temporary.

It does take some force to pop the rivets, but no so much as to require a special gun or a Hulk physique. Perhaps it was the wrong end piece, as @Devious6 said above. If the installation is too wobbly for your tastes, you need to drill them out and install a new set of rivets, let me know.

 

I used a 3/16 piece, per the instructions. I thought I had the wrong tip but I triple checked at various points along my journey to insanity. It was a good workout at least.

 

I had issues with mine, too. I had to cut the stems off myself. I think the gun I had isn't for these rivets. These are a little hardier than your all aluminum rivets.

 

Maybe it's a rivet gun issue in that case. Check out this video at about 13:25 for an idea of how the gun should pop the rivets.