What Have You Done To Your 2nd Gen Tacoma Today?

Full detail, inside and out.
Spent 7 hours on it.

Sanded down bumpers, side bars, and then sprayed a fresh coat of paint on them.

New rims and tires going on tomorrow.
Stepping up to 295x70x17.

 

I had those wheels, i kinda miss them

 

on 35s

 

Real nice truck you got there.
A re-gear is next, how does the 4.88s do on the Hwy with 35s?

 

Does great, cant tell the tires are 35s or the gears are 4.88s.

I would run 33s on 4.88s if I had to.

 

What's your RPM at 75mph?

 

Around 2k

 

Nice. Thanks for the info brother.

 

It flies right by you on the interstate.

If I did it over again I would have done 4.88s instead of 4.56s. with running 35s

 

Hey now that was my wife driving

 

Shifter boot
https://www.ebay.com/itm/3918076948...qhcgj2grbc&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

Door panel
https://www.ebay.com/itm/3530689582...qhcgj2grbc&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

Center counsel
https://www.ebay.com/itm/3530689575...qhcgj2grbc&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

Steering Wheel
https://www.eastdetailing.com/collections/infiniti

 

Ok. Slightly epic post. I have been meaning to get a Tacoma for a while - and finally needed an island truck for Maui and I got a great deal on a 2012 (4.0L V6 4x4 maxed out on trim). It was a hair over 120k miles but the entire undercarriage was spotless so I grabbed it.

Best part was it already had slightly beefier tires and a slight lift.

Anyway I did a bunch of things to it - a LOT with the help of this forum so I thought I'd share.
With the exception of the overall paint swap for the entire truck - I did everything myself or with a friend (and it was mostly pretty easy stuff)

Here's the truck in its finished state. (It started out as a bog-standard Silver Mica)



The inspiration for the color scheme was the old Gulf-Oil colored Porsche (the official colors are apparently called Powder Blue and Gulf Orange)

Main car body was blue - Toyota Emblems, Faux Hood Scoop and Brake Calipers were painted Orange as contrasts.



Had to sneak a few quick photos near a parking lot in Santa Monica before I dropped it off at the shipping brokers.



Let's do the mods from the outside in - since we started with the colors I'll show some closeups of that since I feel they turned out really really well:



Ah yes - the grille - I didn't like the OEM 2nd gen grille so I swapped it out and grabbed the Raptor lights at the same time. Here's a close-up detail of the grille:



I followed the same pattern for painting all the plastic pieces - scuff with Brillo pad, two coats of Adhesion Promoter, 3 coats of Base color, 2 coats of 2K gloss. Be careful with the aftermarket grille screw holes on the letters - I had to "help" a few with epoxy as they are crappy quality.



I've of course seen plenty of people with Black Matte Emblems on the sides - but for some reason not many people use contrast color here. I was very happy with how it turned out.



Really annoyingly - I had to do this one twice. Because some asshole peeled off the orange TACOMA letters the 2nd day after I did. So if you happen to see someone in the LA area with a single Orange TACOMA emblem - he stole it

Let's see what else is on the outside - HID headlight upgrade:



Definitely looks way better/meaner than the stock setup. It was somewhat of a pain to install but YouTube/Google/just look at it and twist it around and eventually it will fit is your friend

Ooh - totally forgot to take pictures of the Hydraulic lift arms for the hood. Fairly easy to do - and definitely worthwhile.



This rubber pad for that bed wasn't really much of an install (just roll it out and that's it) - but it fits extremely well in a 2nd gen.



Stubby antenna makes it look like a funny RC car - but I liked it. I had to dremel the end a bit to mate smoothly but it didn't take long.

Last but not least - the calipers. I only have disc brakes on the front wheels - but I had some spare orange paint so I decided to do this - here's some pics of the process:



This first pic is what it looks like when the wheel comes off at first.



It's scuffed and masked and then (after adhesion promoter) it's covered with a coat of white as both primer and to make the orange color easier to fill out. (the metal is dark and the color is light)



3 Basecoats and a glosscoat later - the wheel is ready to come back on.



And there you go - Brembo Taco

Ok - now we go inside - the first thing I did was the short shifter. Didn't take any pictures of it - but I was surprised how quick the process was - and the instructions online were decent.

Then I did the Fire Extinguisher - for those who don't know the Fire Element - google it - it's an awesome piece of kit (basically gives you 5 times as much time to put out the fire as a FULL SIZE fire extinguisher - even though it's tiny). Here it is attached to a seat rail bracket (which I slightly modded to change the angle and make it smaller. My girlfriend has a habit of kicking it otherwise.



Then I did AJT design knobs (I got the keyfob cover also) - I did all 4 even though the picture only shows 3.



And now we come to the head-unit - which took - well - way too f***ing long.
Selecting it was fairly easy - Schosche TA2111B was my go to for the faceplate - and it mated perfectly with the ATOTO S8 (I maxed out the RAM on the ATOTO since I know Android head-units can be sluggish)

For what it's worth I got the ATOTO S8 ULTRA (Amazon)

I upgraded the front door speakers at the same time.

But the speakers were trivial in comparison to doing the head-unit completely.



It looks lovely once it is done - but you will find that the following 3 things can be somewhat of a pain.

1. SWC (steering wheel controls)
2. BT Mic (re-using the OEM one)
3. Rear-View camera (re-using the OEM one)

SWC was eventually easy enough - got two pieces from Crutchfield to make it work - but it required manual reprogramming - and crucially I needed to override the auto-detection of the head-unit to set it to "Pioneer" in order to make it work.

BT Mic took foreeeeeeever - because me and my friend were being idiots about ground-loops.
There is a thread on TW that discusses this in detail - but in essence - you open the panel between the two vanity lights:



(Picture also shows LED upgrade which I did to all interior lights)

Once you open the panel you can extract the entire Mic and you have to bypass the Pre-amp board to make things work. (even if you decide to use your own mic you do not have to run new wires down the driver side A pillar - you can use the existing wires)

Once we had that working - all that remained was the rear-view camera.

Well - let's just say I shorted two of them.

Mostly because I was a moron - but also because one of the wiring diagrams suggested online is incorrect. Fortunately there's a good thread on TW for this also.
Once you figure out which wire is the Reverse Switch wire (hint - it's brown and it goes hot/12V when the reverse gear is engaged - keep probing until you find it) then you can just cut that wire and run the hot side into the Head-unit.

This is of course assuming you do NOT want to have Reverse camera view into the Rear View Mirror - but just into the head-unit - and you do NOT want to have a Blue-screen flashing there momentarily.

Since I wanted neither of these things - that's what we did.



Once you're done that's what it looks like.

There might have been a few more things (custom fit floor mats in the front come to mind) but these were the main ones.

By all means ask me questions if you have any while this is still fresh in my mind. Thanks again for all the help while I was figuring this out.

 

Pretty good first post there, welcome to the money pit

 

Added Dirt King and TC decals

 

We went through north Texas into Arkansas. Made it all the way from SA Texas to Nashville in one days drive that was a trek!

 

Thanks for the info brother that is why I posted here to see if someone would confirm it was In fact closed. That sucks I was really wanting to get a better shot outside of the tunnel than all those jeepers you see on google lol

 

I mush say yeah my McNiels also weren't in the best of shape they needed a lot of prep work before paint but I’m happy with the end result

 

@MasonSTL Thanks for the share

 

Big upgrades.

First I added new DV8 bumpers last month along with a Smittybilt winch. The front bumper was not compatible with the factory skid plate so I had one made. Also, the rear bumper was not compatible with the factory trailer hitch but now the two are integrated together so they both work with each other.

Second, since I have so many aftermarket accessories I upgraded to a high-output alternator (240 amp) and a super duper deep cycle AGM battery by X2 Power. The battery was designed for use in an RV and has separate terminals for accessories.

And finally, really neat isolation switch for the winch since I won't be using it all that often.
https://www.lambtekinnovations.com

Big shoutout to Chance at AZ Fabrication and Repair for making all of this happen.
https://azfabricationandrepair.com/

 

New wheels.
Stepped up to 295x70x17 with a full size spare.