New England B.S. Thread

I was going to take a picture of the mileage on my truck the other day but by the time I pulled my phone out it changed. It read something like 176671, it was the same forwards and back.

 

Probably dumb maintenance question but I honestly just don't know and wanna learn...So I get occasional belt squeaking/chirp on cold start but not every time. Today it was more noticeable than usual and seemed to happen for a bit longer. Seems to go away after driving for a bit, like today by the time I got to the post office I don't think I heard anything and it was gone by the time I got home. Quick visual inspection of the belt and it looks fine, I'll probably feel around a little later for the areas not easily visible and check for defect. My question is, is it the belt tensioner or a pulley? I thought tacomas had an automatic tensioner so it can't be adjusted. What would cause it to go away once the engine warms?

 

It’s the right part, I have the wrong engine. I need to grind down and make it fit. Went to local John Deere place and talked, then came home sent pictures to show I wasn’t crazy.

 

Well that would do it....

 

Certainly not a dumb question and can be tricky to pin point if you've never done it before. If your info is correct, you have a 2012 which means it's likely ready for some new pulleys and a belt. The squeeking you're hearing is likely a bearing starting to tell you it needs replacing and it's not uncommon for the noise to go way when things warm up. When I did mine, I replaced all of the idler pulleys, figuring if one was starting to make noise, the other 2 aren't far behind. With that approach, I never bothered to determine WHICH pulley was making the noise. I also replaced the belt at the same time.

If you want to pin point which pulley is making the noise, you can try and listen and see if you can tell where in the engine it's coming from or some old mechanics used to take a piece of metal, put it on the bolt holding each pulley in place and have their ear up to the other end of it. The one that makes the funny noise is the culprit. If you've never done it before, I wouldn't recommend this method, there's a lot that can go wrong.

After you take the pulley off, you can spin them in your hands and you can usually quickly tell which one was the issue. It's the one that feels like there's sand paper instead of a bearing on the inside.

 

Thanks for the info! Yes I do have a 2012 but the belt was replaced before I bought the truck a couple years ago (~30-35k miles or so since then). Would the next logical step be to remove the belt then check each pulley?

 

You can put a wrench on the tensioner to get the tension off the belt and free spin the idlers one at a time (You don't have to completely remove the belt but you may need/want an extra set of hands). If one feels rough or shaky, that one's your likely culprit. Keep in mind, this very likely isn't something that's going to fail on you tomorrow (it could, but if it just started making a little noise only when it's cold, it's not overly likely).

 

It happened maybe a few times this winter but I chalked it up to the cold. But now it's been more consistent in the past couple months. It still hasn't been every single cold start. But like I said, today definitely made me go "yeah should definitely try taking a closer look"

 

I just pretend that my truck has a blower on it and that's why it makes all the noises it does.

 

If I had a disposable income... I'd have a blower on the 6.2 in a hot second!

 

Have you had it since new? Maybe someone swapped the engine. Mine had a 23 HP Kohler on it that was blown so the people I bought it from put an 18 HP Briggs Vanguard on it instead. When the deck or transmission croak I could probably still get a few hundred out of it on account of that engine. Vanguards are commercial engines and aren't cheap.

 

Always been mine

 

See if someone close to you has a mechanics stethoscope. Or you could use a piece of tubing.
Carefully being the operative word here then with the truck is running you can touch it to each center bolt and listen to each bearing.
It will be obvious quickly, unless its all of them.

 

https://www.tacomaworld.com/threads/kc-pro-sport-hid-issue-stumped.667303/

My newest annoyance, on a day of many annoyances. Anyone got any ideas?

Annoyance #2
Last week I drove the Vette to work and was enjoying life. I was loading my work stuff into the passenger seat and the gap around my stereo caught my eye, as seen here:
IMG_6628 by Mike M, on Flickr

Now, for GM standards, that's a solid, quality panel fit, but it annoyed me. So I decided to push on it...bad, bad idea. A little background on my car. When I bought it, it had an aftermarket stereo setup in it with a Kenwood HU that was very top of the line in 2006 as far as sound quality, but not necessarily features went. I've got a custom fiberglass enclosure, Boston Acoustic 5-channel amp, sub, components, the whole nine and it sounded really good and could slam if I wanted it to. The radio surround is one giant piece and as you all might know about GM cars in the 80s / 90s is that they didn't use a standard DIN style radio. So whomever did the stereo custom fiberglassed the surround to fit the Kenwood HU and did a tremendous job with it, it did look pretty factory. The problem is that the Kenwood HU didn't have any sort of decent input option available. The only input was to use an old iPod through a 30 pin connector into the CD input. So I couldn't search for songs through the HU, but only advance and go back. There were no BT modules, no nav add-in and the wallpaper was unchangeable and looked like it came from Windows 95.

So very long story short, I got a Pioneer NEX-4100 from my best friend and threw it in. It had all the good stuff, CarPlay, etc. The problem is that's a big, honking head unit with a motorized face. I had to sand my surround to fit it and even then it barely fit, hence the less than ideal panel gaps you see. In addition, some of the mounting points started to crack (thanks GM!) and I ended up using larger washers as a way to spread the load. The CarPlay feature had no bass to be found, but who cares, that's another story. So back to last week, I pushed the panel in and the mount by the steering wheel cracked.

I had been selling all my leftover parts from my seat rebuild in hopes to eventually get the C6 Z06 shifter (which ended up getting superceded by the base C6 shifter with a new bushing design). In a moment of "I'm sick of the kids, I'm retail therapying myself" I bought a brand new Metra bezel, which doesn't match the interior 100% but will work with my HU and costs less than 50% of the "perfect" product, a C6 shifter, and the Centennial Edition shift knob / boot combo (this will be useful later) and because of the shiping difficulties right now sad back and watched. I also bought a new center console hinge since my was broken since before I bought the car and I was sick of having it broken. The latch didn't hook up one time and in anger I slammed it down and broke the latch somehow and cracked the plstic (Thanks GM!) The hinge came this weened, I threw it in, superglued the crack to the point you don't notice it and fixed the latch. It's amazing to finally have a functional center console.

So the Centennial Edition knob / boot setup looks like this:


I thought it was kinda cool and ordered it. I just heard back from Tasca today that you cannot get those parts anymore from GM. I called a performance shop that sells it on their site and they cannot get it either (why is it on their site...I do not know). Ebay showed the knob available, but not the boot, unless I wanted to go aftermarket, which I don't love the idea of.

There were a few other options, you could have the stock leather black stitched knob and boot, a red stitched black leather knob and boot, and the Carbon edition suede blue stitched knob and boot. I called up Tasca and asked for the availability options. Turns out you can get the black leather knob with red stitching from GM still, but not the boot. You cannot get the Carbon edition knob or boot and for good measure you cannot even get the stock C6 base boot from GM anymore.

So, in a last ditch effort, I ran to eBay and found they made a 60th anniversary edition suede knob / boot combo that should look kinda cool, so I jumped on it.

This is what I picked out


I'm sure the suede will wear through fast I'm sure, but who cares, I think it'll be cool.

So now I'll tear apart the whole interior again, to see what I can do. I'm going to try to throw a back up camera in it, again. Last time I did that I got sparks in the dash in reverse, which was troubling, but I'll work through that as time allows. Hopefully by the time I'm done with the Vette I'll have all the stupidity fixed on it, just in time to save up for another car.

 

Kids, for one thing. Big time.

At my building my laptop never moves. I have a keyboard/mouse tray below the desk which is all I touch, so no way to bump/drop/spill anything on it

 

Wasn't that one of the Beagle Boys' prison numbers?

 

Harbor Freight jack stand recall. It's pretty big, I've got some that are covered.
https://jalopnik.com/dont-trust-your-life-to-these-jack-stands-1843546730

 

I bought some of the 6 ton ones for my landcruiser after being a retard and not using them to drop my driveshaft, and subsequently having the truck roll back a few feet with me under it causing a giant gash in my shoulder needing a metric fuck ton of stitches. What sucks is no returns until this nonsense is over.