What have you done to your Tacoma today? 1st Gen Edition

It would be interesting to cut apart a moog and compare. I think it was @Dirty Pool who brought up in the past that the moogs lack the grey Teflon liner. So with the greased joints, that space is occupied by grease instead, which my mind says doesn't have to "wear out" the grease just has to dry or squeeze out before you have the metal on metal wear, which to my mind would be more failure prone for the fact that the greased ones need maintenance and the OEM ones don't.

What I'm no longer remembering well is, I thought the 555 were OEM from Toyota dealerships. I could be wrong but I recall that the ones I've always bought from dealerships are cast as 555.

 

The anonymous fab ones now have a boot and top cap option for protection

 

What’s an in spec caster? I have almost 0 caster so I don’t know if that’s good or bad

 

Getting a pretty rough shudder from the trans around 20mph so decided to do a drain and fill just to see what happens... will probably do it another 2 times to swap more. Just need to get another year out of this trans. Thought it was the carrier support but that made no difference.

 

I think stock caster spec is like 2.6* of positive caster. Lifted we shoot for around stock to 3* or so. Unless you have after market upper control arms you probably won't have great caster when lifted.

 

35mm ball, 30mm opening.

You'd have to really mess up for them to fail.

 

Moog's are reported to be made by Sankei under the 555 brand. @Dirty Pool covered this years ago here and has added info as it comes to light.

As for whether or not Sankei/555 made BJs for Toyota or not is mute. The important takeaway here is that whoever made the Toyota OEM BJs, they made them to Toyota specs and design which is not the same as Moog/Sankei/555.

Here is a cut up Sankei/555 that another TW member did.

 

Still, they can and have pulled out of the ball socket. Just ask Monte, he's done it twice IIRC.

 

Thrice

 

So aftermarket ucas will bring my caster from around 0° to the more desirable 2-3°?

 

Maybe. But some of his failures were dues to bolts coming off and shearing the remainder and had nothing to do with the ball joint itself.

 

Oh I thought the single cab failure was a balljoint pullout too

 

You should do a little research on this but most brands of uniball type uppers add 2° of positive caster by default.

 

Wait, the single cab had a bj failure too?

 

Yes, but keep in mind they achieve that by bring your ubj closer to the cab thus reducing tire clearance.

 

Ok you're right, I went and looked and the 555 parts I have are the tie rods not the ball joints. They aren't marked. Either way the only way to end this discussion is OEM is the only right choice.

Yeah he had just backed out of a parking space. Left it there and brought Igor with the tools to fix it.

 

the poster child eh?

 

I'm sure he's had a mention in a Toyota internal memo at least once

 

That's the thing, everyone gets so nervous about the lower ball joints because they go to Google and type in "Tacoma ball joint failure" and they see all the pictures of failed ball joints, but they don't realize that they are all just pictures of montes trucks.

 

I just saw a cross section from everyone cutting them in half and learned there’s been case studies performed, slow down now