Diet Taco... trying to keep things light

I was very interested in E rated LTX AT2’s based on my experience with the P metric version on my T100. Not a lot of offroad, but some miles in DV and really nice on wet pavement and snow. But the dealer I bought my KO2’s from said they’re basically unavailable in an LT 265/75-16. And the Michelin Defender was much more expensive than the BFG.

 

Death Valley Spring Break Teaser

Sharing the magic of Death Valley with a five year old is pretty special...

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So glad to hear this! I’m taking my almost 3 year old at the end of the month. Can’t wait to see the look on her face.

 

Improved Jack
Spring 2017

I'm getting nearly a year late writing this up because I thought I had already written it up! Turns out I just mentioned it a few times here and did a bit of a write up in another thread.

As you may have read already I'm not a fan of hi-lift jacks. First they are big and heavy. Second while extremely versatile they are equally versatile at injuring people. I carried one for a about a decade in my previous truck but decided to ditch it with the new truck.

That leaves the question as to what exactly would I use instead of the Expo-cred Hi-lift? Over the past few years I've finally come to something I'm really happy with.

Adapters/Extensions/Plates

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Early on I acquired a set of bottle jack adapters from Safe Jack which are pretty pricey for what they are but very functional. I didn't end up getting their bottle jack nor did I get their base plate as I had other plans for those. My set is very slightly different from the one depicted above but is functionally identical.

The "RIGHT" Jack

The reason I didn't get the bottle jack that Safe Jack offered because it was a hydraulic bottle jack. While a hydraulic jack is nice in the garage I don't feel it is a useful emergency jack simply because it isn't reliable. It can leak/break in storage and thus be useless when you actually need it. This is I suspect why the OEM bottle jack that comes with the truck is a mechanical screw jack.

The second reason to avoid the hydraulic jack is that it can of course fail while in use necessitating that you also have a jack stand along if you are going to work on the truck while it is jacked up. The beauty of a screw jack is that it can't fail and is its own jack stand. If used as a jack stand it better have a useful top to it (hence the adapter kit above) and a really good base (see below).

Unfortunately the OEM screw jack that comes with the 2nd Gen Tacoma has a wider ram than most hydraulic bottle jacks and so the Safe Jack adapters won't fit. I talked with Safe Jack and they were considering making an adapter but they helpfully mentioned that on older 4Runner jack had an appropriate sized ram. So I tracked that down as part number 09111-35150.

Tacoma Left, 4Runner Right
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The 4Runner jack has very slightly less working height and a very slightly higher capacity (1500kg). The top cover of the ram still has to be removed as it is slightly wider than the shaft itself which is just perfect for the Safe Jack adapters. One could probably just knock it off with a chisel but I opted to drill out the dimples that were holding it on after which just a little more tapping popped it right off.

I've actually purchased two of these 4Runner jacks off of ebay and plan to sell my OEM Tacoma jack on ebay for the same price.

Custom Stand

Safe Jack makes some nice stands that adapt to a bottle jack. These are kind of pricey, a tiny bit heavy and while flat are another sort of big thing to find a spot for. There is also of course the time honored piece of plywood or other such solution which is lighter, weaker but also a bit large. Lastly in my experience jacking situations off road can be on pretty unfortunate surfaces with the vehicle tilted meaning a very large footprint is desired.

With that in mind I decided to make my own custom stand that would be very light, strong and compact. I already store some long thin things like a breaker bar, pry bar and such under the rear seats and so the plan was to make a two piece stand from square aluminum tubing that would form a large cross when attached to the jack. I chose aluminum because it is lighter for a given strength than steel, it doesn't need any finishing to avoid corrosion and most importantly because it is easy to work with in my ghetto "machine shop". By ghetto I mean a twenty year old cheap Hazard Freight drill press with a Dremel bit in the chuck!

Ghetto Tools Presents...
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With a little care, thought, ingenuity and experimentation I was able to do some reasonably clean fabrication. Using either a triangle clamped onto the work piece as a front/back guide (featured in photo above) or another tube clamped onto the drill press table as a side-to-side guide I was able to create a ghetto-mill to cut the tubes where they would overlap. I intentionally bought one extra section of tube to experiment with which was good because I murdered that one pretty good. Word to the wise - think carefully about how the bit is going to apply torque to the work piece when orienting your guides. If you get it wrong the work piece will walk away from the guide, if you get it right the torque will press the work piece into the guide and you'll hardly have to hold it. Use plenty of cutting oil of course.

Final Result

It all came out quite nicely if I do say so myself:

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Field Use

I've already used it a few times in the field - both non-emergency situations fortunately! Shown below is when I ground down the rear shock buckets while in Basin and Range NM this past June. I also used it to rotate the tires in Saline Valley in December. Remember, I don't live anywhere near my truck so my "shop" is usually the great outdoors someplace and my entire tool chest lives either behind or under the rear seats!

I've got two more tube sections to cut so I'll have a matched pair of stands and I might add a second plate and short extension from Safe Jack as well. For now I'm quite happy with what I consider a light, compact, reliable and rock solid jacking solution for field work.

Last must give a shout-out to @Subway4X4 who has put together an awesome thread covering good jacking solutions and techniques.

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That's brilliant, I've resorted to carrying a floor jack and some wood around since I lifted my truck, but I like this solution a lot better. My only question is, what adapter do you use to grab the front jack point with? I'd be concerned with it slipping off the flat plate

 

Thanks for posting this. As you predicted, the original Westward jack that came with my kit failed in two years. I then replaced it with the Omegalift only to find out that it has a larger ram and the Safe Jack accessories didn't fit. Kudos to Safe Jack; they sent me a jack screw adapter for the Omegalift free of charge and solved that problem. I'm now on the hunt for a reasonably-priced 4runner jack.

 

Nope, no sliders, I'm talking about the small, round OEM front jack point underneath the front of the truck, the one built in to the frame

 

Yes, that was one of my thoughts too. I'm not a MechE and I don't have analysis software around to use nor would I want to take the time to figure out how to use any, but as a sanity check I used an online beam bending calculator when deciding what tube to get. For my square aluminum tube (1.25" OD, 0.125" wall, 24" long) free supported only at the ends and center loaded at the limit of the jack rating (3300 lbs) the deflection is 0.8". Naively that seems pretty mild and unlikely to be even close to plastic deformation. In the region where the crossover occurs more exciting things must happen but this area is also backed by the steel jack base as well. The milled cutouts naturally have rounded corners as a function of using the Dremel bit which presumably reduces stresses in the corners of the cuts but deciding how much it would take to cause fracturing there is way, way beyond anything I can analyze. So my naive analysis had to just end with would I be scared looking at a 24" bar deflecting under load by 0.8" - not really.

The above numbers are of course a very worst case estimate as it assumes just one of the bars is taking the entire load with the jack floating above some sort of really wide rut. A wise user would also get out the shovel in such a situation to help make matters a little better for the jack stand.

I've got armor covering the front center jack point so not something I've had to worry about. As DoorDing alluded to off-road I'm more likely to jack around the perimeter of the truck on the frame members. That or the rear axle when changing a tire (another benefit of bottle jack vs. hi-lift is that when you jack from the axle you don't have to jack up through the entire droop of the rear suspension, the wheel comes up with a lot less effort and with the truck much less perilously tipping if changing a tire or trying to build up a road or traction under a tire).

One thing I've been considering looking into is a good traction material to put between the flat pad and whatever surface it might be engaging with in cases I end up with a weird jacking arrangement. I'm inspired by @GHOST SHIP who cunningly used part of an old tire to make a hi-lift foot way safer against slipping when used on pavement or concrete. Nicely written up by @Crom here.

For reference the recommended jacking/lifting points:

Yeah I've had too much experience with hydraulic jacks and it certainly isn't like they are getting more reliable these days! Glad to hear Safe Jack treated you right. They were great to communicate with when I was trying to figure out the best path forward using a screw jack.

The 4Runner jack has 10.5" of travel. It is 7.5" closed and 18" extended. With a Safe Jack pad/adapter you'd lose about 1" of that travel where the ram slides into the pad/adapter.

 

In all fairness I got the idea from somewhere else. One of the gems of this site buried somewhere, but I found it and applied it. As @Crom can attest, cutting the tire is a bit of a PITA. The combination or rubber and steel eats through cut of wheels. I think it takes one wheel per jack pad I was making. Then of course there’s the smell of burnt tires to deal with. Definitely make these outside if you have a go at it. I’ve since gotten better at cutting tires and can cut them with neater edges. Nonetheless, it’s a great use for your old take offs.

 

hot wire? use that to cut off the rubber, then cut the steel cords with a cutoff wheel

 

You rang?

Not really a master, but I have been jacking a lot lately.

I agree with using the the front center “jack point” or “bump” as little as possible. Even on a flat/level surface, when I used that center point, I ended up scootching jack stands under the front corner points (see @DVexile ’s diagram) and bringing up one notch at a time as I lifted the center point. Hustling back and forth between the front corners is a PITA.

It’s much easier for me to jack up one corner, apply jackstand, then do the same for the other corner. Much safer IMO.

 

Yes. I bought one on eBay and the jack went up on first try. But it would NOT go down, no matter what I did to coax or force it down.

I didn’t take it apart, but when I examined it further, the internals that were visible was devoid of any lubrication and was showing significant rust. The eBay seller immediate refunded.

But what I think is important to note, is that the failure was on the upstroke. I believe whatever was broken internally, it jammed up the mechanical workings so that it would not break loose and bring my truck down if there was a failure in the field. Hopefully that was a planned fail-safe design of the jack. I feel comfortable with it’s usefulness as an emergency jack and field jack stand.

 

Haven't had them apart because not confident I could do so without damaging. I suspect, as @Subway4X4 experienced, the primary failure mode would be not extending or retracting due to corrosion or wear. Both of mine are practically new looking and operate smoothly but at some point I'll need to look into the best thing to do for long term servicing.

Mine are definitely more in the "emergency use" category though I'll likely use them a fair bit more than most folks do. I will use them way, way less than a shop jack though!

The only lead I could get on the difference in reliability for a jack sold with a vehicle vs. a "professional" floor jack were in some AU/NZ standards for jacks. AS/NZS 2963 is the standard for jacks sold with a vehicle or other generic jacks and its durability test is 50 cycles under full load. AS/NZS 2615 is the standard for shop trolley jacks and its durability test is 200 cycles under full load. That's not a whole lot of help, but it gives some idea as to the difference between something meant to be used multiple times a day (shop jack) compared to what is in a vehicle for emergencies.

 

Thoughts on a scissor jack? I bought one on Amazon that had decent reviews cause it had a bigger footplate than the Tacoma bottle jack. It’s still in its box in my truck toolbox. Haven’t used yet.

I’ve had the bottle jack tip over once luckily with the wheel still on and me not near it.

 

I'd expect they are similarly reliable as the screw jacks that come standard in the Tacoma or the 4Runner. They seem very common with standard cars because most cars have quite low clearance and so a bottle/screw jack won't work but a scissor jack is excellent for slipping under low clearance cars.

The downside to the scissor jack is I don't know how to extend it they way the bottle/screw jack does using the Safe Jack parts. You can of course stack stuff under the scissor jack but that might become perilous. In the standard "need to change a flat" situation though as long as the scissor jack has enough throw there should be no need for extensions.

If you haven't already I'd double check it works for both the front and rear wheels. Usually the rear is easy if you jack from the axle because you don't have to deal with suspension droop. The front is often the bigger issue because if you jack from the frame now you need to lift things enough to get through all the front suspension droop before the wheel clears and you want to make sure you have enough travel/height with the scissor jack to get that high.

Yikes!

I've had to use a bottle jack once on the side of a road where road crown, soft shoulder and vehicle angle made things look scary. I gave the vehicle a good shove a few times before removing the wheel and never reached into the wheel well while doing the change. It still really didn't make me feel very safe at all. Standard jack stands make me nervous too if there is any tilt or road crown to deal with.

I did once intentionally tip a bottle jack though! Being a complete idiot in my old truck I managed to get the rear diff hung up on a rock by backing up at low speed onto it. Plan A was to jack up the rear wheels and get some more dirt rocks under the tires. Once it was jacked up on one side enough to get stuff under I saw that I had lifted the diff off of the rock by a fair bit. Thus I formed and executed Plan B which was to just get back in the truck and drive forward letting the jack pivot/tip over which would keep the diff clear of the rock as I moved forward. Plan B worked perfectly! That said I don't think I'd ever do that again, in hindsight it smells a lot of trying to fix stupid with more stupid.

 

Ken, curious if you looked into the Pro Eagle Jack, and if so why you didn't choose that as a truck jack.

https://www.proeagle.com/

They make varying levels of jacks, but overall seem like a good fit for your needs. Their jack extensions used to fit Harbor Freight aluminum jacks, but since HF is always changing their designs/model numbers, it isn't universal anymore. Had a friend that bought their jack extension and with a little filing of the mounting hole, it was able to fit his 1.5 ton HF jack. I may go this route sometime in the future with my 2 ton AL jack

 

I hadn't seen those specifically (or maybe I did and have forgotten) but the similar ones I looked at had two marks against them for my uses. One was weight and size. The 2 ton weighs 47 lbs and is quite bulky compared to the tiny little bottle screw jacks I'm now running. I can get two bottle jacks, a bunch of adapters/extensions and my tube stands all in just part of the under seat storage. The second was it is a hydraulic jack and thus would still require jack stands to feel safe working under the truck.

They do look like really sweet jacks that have the big advantage of working great both in the shop and out on the trail. And for someone doing "real" off-roading or competition type stuff where you expect to need to use the jack frequently and want to deploy and use it quickly they look like a home run. I'd think if you were doing the kind of trail runs where it makes sense to carry two spare tires then that means you are probably expecting to be doing a lot of jacking and something like these jacks would be excellent. For me the jacks are much less frequently used and so I'm willing to trade a lot more setup time not to mention slower jack operation for the reduced weight and size.

Good find, thanks for posting it!

 

well, they dont necessarily have to be slower. a common mod in the Amateur Stage Rally scene is welding an appropriately sized nut in place of the hook connection on the scissor/bottle jacks, and using an electric impact gun to raise/lower the jack. with a decently powerful gun, it takes about 3 seconds to lift the average rally car to full height to change a flat.

 

Sliders
March 2017

In an earlier post I wrote about deciding on adding sliders to the truck and choosing some Pelfreybilt bolt-on sliders. I ordered them back in November and while there was a long lead time that was fine since I wanted to pick them up rather than have them shipped and I'd be in SoCal come March. Well it is March so the sliders were picked up and installed!

It turns out that @Crom lives not far at all from Pelfreybilt and awesome dude that he is offered to let me use his driveway for the install while also lending some much appreciated help! We met about lunch time and I took the opportunity to borrow a grease gun to hit various zerks since a grease gun is way too messy to store in my truck leaving me to beg for grease on the center median at busy intersections every 5000 miles.

Next we headed to a local Mexican joint for some absolutely delicious food. Being a San Diego native I miss "authentic" Mexican food. (For the record "authentic" Mexican food is however it was prepared where you grew up). Great little family owned joint that has been around for 35 years. I could taste why they've lasted so long.

After that off to Pelfreybilt to pick up the sliders. They fit diagonally in the short bed with just a bit sticking out the back. Nick brought along some ratchet straps so we could secure everything down. They were already wrapped in foam sheets and Pelfreybilt provided some spare cardboard as well to keep them pretty on the ride back.

We got back to Nick's house and unloaded the sliders. I started doing an inventory of the hardware and fasteners and reading the instructions. By the time I turned around from doing that Nick already had one slider out on jack stands lining it up with the frame. As the instructions were a bit short on photos and fairly concise it was really helpful to have the slider up on the stands while we both looked at the various mounting points and what not. Besides having two pairs of hands just having two heads thinking everything through was good.

The slider mounting design is very well thought out. Indeed they are entirely "bolt-on" with no need to drill or grind. At least for my truck, the instructions did warn that some vehicles might find a rivet that needed grinding or one hole that might need to be drilled. There are six 1/2" bolts per slider, five of them through the side of the frame and one through the front cross member from below on a long tab that sticks out from the slider. Each bolt threads into a very beefy backing plate. The front two go through a single large backing plate which is slid inside the closed part of the frame at the front. The plate for the cross member needs to be tucked in before putting the slider in place. The remaining three are in the C-channel portion of the frame (the open part) and are therefore less fussy. Last there is an existing 10mm bolt on the bottom of the frame midway down the truck that holds a cross member which is replaced with a longer and stronger 10mm bolt to attach a small tab on the slider.

The provided instructions are as stated rather concise. Which is just fine, but it really does mean you should reach each and every sentence carefully or you'll find yourself having to reverse steps at some point. We found that reading the instructions with all the hardware in front of us and the slider held up to the frame made it pretty easy to understand exactly what to do.

I was really glad to have Nick's help. This would have been much more difficult to do solo especially without the nice pair of jack stands and four hands to manipulate things into place. We got the passenger side slider on without any incident and the result looked good. Turned around the truck to do the driver side which we knew from the instructions would be a little more fussy because of brake lines that run down the frame on that side.

A spacer is provided to move one of the brake clips out a bit so the brake lines will clear the backing plate nut and bolt that goes through it. Another clip needs to be released so you can slip the front backing plate into the front section of the frame. All of this went quite smoothly. Nick did figure out later in the install that the provided spacer needed to be rotated in conjunction with the small backing plate that goes near it for everything to fit well.

With the brake lines dealt with and the plates in place we got one bolt in the rear of the slider and then went to move to the front. This is where we met our first check. There at first seemed to be some sort of interference or poor fit where we were hitting the pinch weld. After a little thinking and poking at things we realized the actual problem was the long tab on the sliders that gets attached under the front cross member. This tab was bent a bit too far - it should be a fair bit less than 90 degrees to follow the contour of the cross member. It was preventing us from lifting the front end of the slider into place high enough. Nick was laying under the truck at this point and could see the identical tab on the other side and noticed immediately that it appears this tab is designed to deform a bit on installation. Looking at the design carefully it was pretty clear that indeed that was the intention.

So with that in mind the question was just how to get the tab at a better angle for the install. One option would be to take it off the truck and try to beat on it, pry it, stand on it or whatever to bend it out a bit. With a little more thought we decided that we could deform it on the frame itself since apparently it should deform on installation anyway. We put the rear bolts in but not fully torqued down. We were able to get the cross member bolt started as well. At this point the slider was flush against the frame but lower at the front than at the back because that tab wouldn't let us raise the front. We were low by about an inch.

Next we got out a bottle jack (Nick had a hydraulic one in the garage) along with my Safe Jack adapters. We used the flat plate with a piece of cardboard on top just to keep things from getting scraped. We put the jack under the front most part of the slider mounting plate and applied force with the jack. Indeed the tab began to deform as expected and the slider moved up into place. We got all the bolts all the way in and tight and Nick could see the tabs now looked identical on both sides of the truck. The slider was now perfectly level and clearing the pinch weld by about a quarter of an inch along the whole side.

Celebrating our success Nick started some clean up while I got ready to torque everything to spec. One nice thing about Pelfreybilt is they actually do specify torque on their instructions. All those 1/2" bolts get torqued to 100 ft-lbs. While I have a digital torque wrench in the truck it doesn't have the longest handle and is trickier to use for high torques. Nick has a Hazard Freight clicker that was perfect for the job. Boy you don't usually need to torque things to 100 ft-lbs, especially when laying under the truck. Combine that with the fact that I'm a wimp and it was a bit of a job to get each bolt to "click".

With everything finally complete Nick insisted the job wasn't done until we tested the slider by putting the truck's weight on it. We ended up doing just one side. Nick got out his hi-lift with its snazzy tire tread foot to prevent slipping and jacked up the whole passenger side until both wheels just lifted off the pavement. We checked deflection of the slider and it was just barely contacting the pinch weld in one spot. So deflection was just about 1/4" at most. Seemed like a good result.

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With the job complete by around 4 pm Nick was kind enough to coordinate with his family so we could all meet for a quick dinner before they had to go to a school activity in the evening. Because his daughters love it so much we were going back to the very same Mexican joint we had lunch at. Nick was apologetic for the repeat but I was elated because I had seen the tacos he ordered at lunch and really wanted to try them too.

I did some last packing up while Nick went to retrieve his kids from school and I headed over to the restaurant early for a well deserved soda. Sitting at an outside table I eventually saw a seven year old girl walk around the front of my truck and start giving the sliders and their installation a pretty thorough inspection. This could only be one person's kid.

Sure enough Nick and his other daughter appeared shortly. A few minutes later his wife met us as well and we had a delightful dinner outside. Soon it was time for us to all go our separate ways but the kids were interested in the truck which Nick had shown them online before. I popped open the Flip-Pac in the parking lot so the kids could clamber around inside. They were pretty ecstatic. And then it was time to go!

I thanked Nick profusely for all his help and jumped into the jaws of evening SoCal traffic as I needed to be in Las Vegas by the next evening for a flight home. Actually the first miles were just fine as I was opposite traffic and then before hitting a snarl I stopped for a couple of hours to catch up on internet things while traffic cleared. From there it was an easy drive up to Barstow for the night.

Right about here there should be an epic photo of the truck with its new sliders perched in front of an amazing Mojave vista. This was the original plan and I mentally scheduled a photo shoot the morning after install somewhere around Barstow. Unfortunately that morning I woke up to discover that due to some horrible flight delays I needed to change my flight out of Las Vegas to one a fair bit earlier in the day. Thus I had to forgo the photo shoot if I was going to have time to also change the oil in the truck and make the new flight time. So no pretty photo for now but the engine should be happier with fresh oil!

I'll be adding the same 3M grip tape that Nick has on his sliders. Also considering some sort of temporary gap cover for the rear part of the slider that my daughter will now have to climb over to get inside. Thinking something simple like some webbing that can be strapped in place only when she is along for a trip.

Naturally we were in such a hurry to get the sliders on that I forgot to weigh the sliders and their hardware. In a future trip I'll make sure to do a "final" weighing of the truck - since of course the build is now "done". I sort of thought it was done before you know...

Once again major thanks to Nick for all his help and some great company while wrenching!

UPDATE SEPT. 2018 - Pelfrey is dead, filed chapter 7. As of this update appear to have left a lot of people having paid but with no product.

 

Nick @Crom is indeed a stand up guy. Sliders look good!