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

No pictures but changed my oil with Mobil 1 synthetic and filter greased the drive shaft. Greased my tie rods sway bar links spc ball joint and lubed up the total chaos Lcanuni balls and bushings

 

Took it out on some errands and filled up the tank. Last fill up was in late December. Ripped the back up sensors out and cleaned up some wiring. Just waiting on the phone call from BAMF for the rear bumper.

 

I bought a gallon of West epoxy for another project, so I used that. Couple of things I made were round, so leaving them in the lathe while the resin cured meant I could turn the part one last time after it hardened - makes a very nice plastic like finish. Then primer out of a rattle can and paint.

 

I got the ARB compressor mounted. The Slee bracket was great. Overall it was a pretty easy install. I’ll probably install the harness & Cruiserhead switches on Monday.

 

I have a spare set that I tinted smoke. Less than 24 hours later someone scratched one of those tinted taillights, I think they were trying to figure out if the tint was on the outside or not, it was. I'll be installing those back on tomorrow.

 

I didn't count turns but that's about what I got on mine too.

 

Why does that look ridiculously wide but like it still has the stock lower control arms?

 

Didn't take many pictures but I removed the steering rack to do the bushings, inner tie rod ends, and, boots.

I think I have all the bushings Energy Suspension offers for our trucks now.






Huge PITA pulling the rack the first time but here's some tips I have learned as this is now the 4th time removing it.

Remove the outer tie rod ends to shorten the overall length, remove the bolts holding the rack to the frame, to allow it to wiggle a little for better positioning on getting to the steering linkage clamps and lines, remove the RH diff bolt for extra clearance, manually steer the rack all the way left using the rack nub (left rod pulled in right rod pushed out) feed the rack and roll it backwards as you do so to the right side of the truck, guide the rh rod over the rh hub and the left rod out the pass through in the frame pull the left side of the rack out the front of the truck.

Reinstallation using reverse order.

Did the rack bushings, a bit of a pain but not too terrible, mine came out in 8 pieces, inner bushings pulled free of the outer bushing halves.

Judicious use of the bench vice clamping the rack with boards, a pickle fork and a small air hammer to get all the old bushing stuff out.

New ones greased up and slid in easy, I was able to fight with and ultimately reuse the boot clamps.

Got rid of the front end clunk I was having in fields and off road, feels much tighter and more responsive in steering.

Unfortunately while down there I discovered both my inner CV boots have finally cracked enough to being puking their grease out so will be doing CV axles in the near future. 240k miles on them before any issues. Last 50k has been lifted.

The axles are still good so I will rebuild them and reboot them and hang onto them as trail spares.

I will be buying new OEM to replace.

 

Big tires, offset, spacers ... or all of the above.

 

Hates doing the rack, took a couple hours to do the swap, hardest part was reinstalling the steering shaft for me

 

My rack needs to be replaced badly but i just don't know if i'm ready for that headache yet

 

Hello everyone! Last week I went to put gas and when I got done filling up I started my car and it turned on and 5 mins later my car iddles/dies out and won’t turn back on. Called my insurance and got it towed back home and now it won't start. I purchased denso starter solenoid repair kit Plunger & 2 contacts and replaced that and it didn't work neither. This afternoon Toyota of Chula Vista calls me and mentioned parts and labor including tax would be $400.90 the part number that’s needed is
82998-24380 and he mentioned only one. That a $18 dollar part plus the remaining is labor and tax. Now who knows where this cable be at ?

 

It's not as bad as it seems, if you're just replacing it it's only a few hour gig, this all took me about 5 hours including clean up, at least a solid hour of that was just fighting the bushings.

It may be more cost effective to replace the inner and outer tie rods and do the polyurethane bushings if your rack it's leaking fluid like crazy.

It's normal for there to be some fluid in the boots even on a new rack.

 

I've been putting it off for at least a month or more. It really wasn't as bad as I thought it would be now that I know the tricks for removal.

I'm glad I did fully remove it to do everything, the service manual says that you can change the inner tie rods and boots on the truck, maybe, but it would be a much bigger pain, but I see no way you can possibly replace the bushings with the rack still installed.

I do remember fighting with the steering shaft majorly the first time I did it, but I think I have my steering shaft installed technically upside down now?

Dunno but it's kind of a non issue.

The column shaft to the intermediary shaft bolts face directly out when the steering wheel is straight, and the intermediary shaft to rack nub bolt faces straight up and down and you can reach around and get at it with a 12 mm ratcheting wrench pretty easily in that position.

Hit the split spline clamps with some penetrating oil, and if you need to get a little pry bar or screwdriver in there to help separate the clamping collars. It's really easy to get everything out when you have the steering rack bolts themselves already removed it practically falls out if you do all the above.

 

That's a wire (I know, Google is hard to use)
maybe if you throw it at the door the truck will be fixed
Might as well since you threw a starter at it

 

Henry Ford once asked a specialist to help him identify what his plant's production bottleneck was.

The specialist identifed the and marked it with a white chalk X and sent Ford then invoice:

The amount of $10,000.

Ford acknowledged Steinmetz’s success but balked at the figure. He asked for an itemized bill.

Steinmetz, Scott wrote, responded personally to Ford’s request with the following:

Making chalk mark $1.

Knowing where to make mark $9,999.

Ford paid the bill.

OP, after throwing a starter at the truck not knowing the issue, and being concerned about the problem being "only an 18-dollar part fix" (your X) what your real problem is is not having the tools and experience to know where to put that part. The technician probably has a body module code which is indicative of a bad connection somewhere so he's telling you more than likely it will be one of those wires and or connections, but the other $382 is to go through all of your wires and plugs to find out where and which the actual damage exists and to actually fix said issue, which more than likely will involve removal of many body panels to access and at a shop rate of more than likely at least $75 an hour... Yeah.

Having done some body harness diag, I can tell you that that price is not unreasonable and as we don't have a whole lot of information to go off of other than your truck sputtered and died, the folks on here probably won't be much help to you either regardless of how many times you repost this issue and hijack other threads.

Electrical Gremlins are just that, Gremlins they're very difficult to diagnose especially when you don't have the truck directly in front of you with a good multimeter, if I were you I'd probably just pay it out of pocket to get it fixed right at the dealer by their specialists, that or get all the training and experience that those technicians have done in order to be able to diagnose it yourself as this isn't a common issue.

 

I will look it up but how hard is inner tie rod end replacement?
Can it be done with rack still in the truck?
Last car I did inner TRE's on was do-able, but it came with some challenges that I'm not sure if applies to the Tacoma as well, such as:
-rack large o-ring had to be replaced, it kind of seals the boot on
-inner boot large clamp had to be replaced, it's Oetiker one time use and gets cut open to remove the boot, gaining access to inner tie rod
-outer steering rack boot clamp (a squeeze spring style) was re-usable

Not sure if the Tacoma also uses that design that basically requires more parts be ready on hand during the job than just new inner tie rod ends themselves

 

Yeah I'm fairly confident the inner tie rods could be done with the rack installed in the truck.

Obviously not as conveniently as having the rack at working height on the bench in a vise, but possible.

As for the rack boots, the outer clamp is a reusable spring style as is typical with Toyota, but the inner clamp is the CV boot style that's got the compression crimp in it.

I was able to reuse mine, but if I had to try and fight them back on with the rack installed I don't think I could have done it.

I used a small screwdriver to expanded the crimp a little bit and was able to just barely fight it back to engagement with vice grips and a screwdriver to push the hook as far as I could then I re-crimped it with a special pair of pliers I have.

I noticed a good handful of aftermarket boot kits just come with a long thin zip tie for the inner clamp so you may be able to get away with just doing that, or getting a thin hose clamp from Amazon or even the steel zip tie style of boot clamps for CV axle boots.

As for the inner tie rods themselves, you will need some pretty large wrenches, or some thin adjustable wrenches to separate them from the actual rack proper. You could use a pipe wrench for the outer portion as I did without reall chewing them up, they shouldn't have that much tension on them. There's also a flat washer that goes behind the inner tie rod threaded face between it and the rack proper that gets bent over the ears on the inner tie rod joint to prevent it from unscrewing your new inner tie rods should come with this.

So all in all if you're going to do the left side, after disconnecting the outer tie rod from the knuckle steer all the way left to push the rack out as far as possible to the left, (steer right when you do the right) remove the outer tie rod and lock nut, remove the boot clamps, slide off the boot, use a chisel to beat the locking ears back, get your wrenches unscrew the inner tie rod, place the new fold over washer with the tabs that engage the rack end facing towards the rack, screw your new tie rod on making sure that those tabs end up in the slot in the rack, snug it down, fold the ears over install a new boot and inner clamp and reuse the outer clamp, then put the outer tie rod lock nut on the new inner tie rod threaded end and install the outer tie rod and reattach to the knuckle torque to 67 ft lb then align the nut with a hole and put the cotter pin in the castellated nut.

The hardest part is re-centering the rack, the rack doesn't really have a middle point that is definable or discernible and doesn't fit centered in the frame. The way I centered the rack was to measure from the innermost lip of the boot to the outermost end of the threaded rod of the inner tie rod about 13 7/8 each side for me.

No o-rings or snap rings to deal with.

There did seem to be some grease on the teeth on the rack rod so I took the time to clean that out and replace the grease probably unnecessary though.

 

ugh....i still haven't heard from them....sounds like i'm bout to go down that road.....thanks for the response...

 

I'll have to keep this in mind the next time I use mdf for a project. I got a sample size jar of some different paint yesterday at Home Depot and added 2 coats. It came out much better this time. Also added 2 coats of spar varnish. Doing the same to the second side today and hopefully will have it installed one evening this week. Thanks again for the tip.