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

Brave man. I don't think I'd want to do 90 in my Tacoma, if it would even go that fast LOL

 

Some of em go faster than the speedo can read, it's a long wheelbase stays stable.

 

my driveshaft on the other hand....

 

I had a little steering play and figured I would check things out. I felt some slight movement in the steering shaft, so out it came.

While I was in there, I cleaned up and shimmed the tilt ball joint and regreased it.


Did the spot weld mod on the shaft joint.


Cleaned up and regreased the u-joint pivot joint.


Replaced the leather on my Lexus steering wheel.


My steering shaft seal was shot, so I removed it and ordered a new one, hopefully it will be here soon, I have a trip this weekend.


I hope this fixes some of my steering slop.

 

Some of em don't have long wheelbases though.

 

I've been lucky in that regard, no driveline vibrations here. My "only rated to 106mph" mud terrains on the other hand probably protest a bit.

 

I have a lovely dent that i have not fixed or balanced out

 

I plopped in a whole new unit, flange to flange, made a bigger improvement.

 

what parts of the cab are rusting? Ive noticed some spots recently but mine seems to be mostly in good shape. Just curious what might be hiding from me.

 

The cons were just the added rpm’s /lower mpg’s and the odometer being off that 3%. The 4.88’s with 295/75-16’s were definitely better than 4.56’s on the trail, definitely a lot more working the clutch now, but I just didn’t like the setup. Truck felt like it ran hotter, more wear and tear on a daily driver truck with 300k+.

What ultimately decided it was had a pinion bearing go bad and ECGS warrantied it so I went to down 4.56’s. Once I add the supercharger and if I add a doubler the 4.56’s are in the perfect spot with the tire size, the speedometer/odo is currently within 1%.

 

Check in your cubbies near the body mounts.




I also have the bottoms of my doors, bottom of my tailgate, and I had to redo my tub job because I never treated the backside inside the panel. Also look in that cavity in general for the rocker. You can usually see that when you remove the floor trim and kick panel, shine a flashlight in there.

Oh you mean the regear in general, I thought just the speedo gear had some sort of disadvantage.

 

After ordering it last December, finally got my Lone Peak installed, very happy with the finished results. Fit and finish is very clean, a lot of smart design, I’d definitely recommend- wait times are down considerably now

 

Congrats my green twin! Can't wait to see more pics of it in action!

 

Wire brushed and primed/painted a bit of my cab. Went with light gray so its easier to identify issues in the future. Going to fluid film it tomorrow after the paint dries. I wanna do the entire underside of the cab but going to chip away at it. Crawling around under the truck is the absolute worst.

 

Looks great!

 

Do your back a favor and get a creeper to roll around on

 

Pretty sweet. Does the cruise control lever on that Lexus steering wheel work with your Gen 1 cruise? I have the dealer installed cruise and hate the location of the controls. Was wondering if anyone has successfully used another Toyota or Lexus steering wheel to make that happen.

 

I had to swap out the tiny resistors from my old cruise control handle to the Lexus one to get it to work.

 

Replaced my radiator!

After running Isuzu pickups for a few years, I really wanted some Toyota reliability in my life. My Isuzu was 34 years old and required a lot of attention.

So I found a 2000 Tacoma base model with the 2.4. It was a facility truck, or the previous owner guessed, a Mall Cop truck. Has holes in the roof where there used to be a flashing yellow light. With 99,000 miles I decided to pay the Toyota tax, 4,800$ to get something reliable I could spend less time underneath and more time driving.

Ran great for a month but developed a little antifreeze smell after driving on the highway. I was wanting to investigate on the weekend, but.......on the way home. Steam! coming out from the hood. So I pulled over, let things cool down, limped it home and started looking into it. Found some good info on here and on YouTube. Started checking cooling system stuff to discover a crack in the upper radiator! just to the right of the upper radiator hose. Must be a common spot because I noticed that same crack in some of the radiators on YouTube. Thanks for the recommendations on here I found a Denso radiator through the local NAPA. Already bought 2 new radiator hoses to swap out. I have replaced radiators before, so it was similar. Nice not having to remove the fan like some other engines.

The problem was reinstalling the mounting bolts. The new radiator had spring clips instead of bolt holes like the OEM one. Took some advice on here about aligning the spring clips, but could not get the bolts to go in. Didn't want to start threading and I kept dropping the damn things. Well, I picked one up and examined it. It was stripped out a little bit. I still had only managed to get two in and the others didn't want anything to do with getting started. So off I went to the hardware store. In the nuts and bolts section, in the 1,001 bins I found some actual spring clip bolts that fit perfectly, a little longer with a nice point on them to help get started. Got 4 of them so they would all match and be the same size bolt head. And less than 6$. Went in smoothly. Radiator nice and secure.

 

Congrats on the toy addition. FWIW have found the replacement rad side mounts might not line up with the front apron mounting holes. Have swapped the mounts from old rads onto the densos so the front apron holes line up.